Full text of "Japanese Culture"

See other formats

T?US V ?

■- “JM 4 *

* *

n ■* -»i*

Japanese Culture

This page intentionally left blank

Japanese Culture

FOURTH EDITION

Updated and Expanded

Paul Varley

University of Hawaii Press

Honolulu

Printed in the United States of America
05 04 03 02 01 00 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Varley, H. Paul

Japanese culture / Paul Varley. — 4th ed.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8248—2292-7 (cloth) — ISBN 0-8248-2152-1 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Japan — Civilization. I. Title.

DS821.V36 2000

952— dc21 99-057345

University of Hawai'i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and
meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on
Library Resources.

Printed by The Maple- Vail Book Manufacturing Group

To Donald Keene

This page intentionally I eft blank

Contents

Preface ix

Major Periods and Cultural Epochs of Japanese History x

Chinese Dynasties Since the Time of Unification Under xi

the Han

Author’s Notes xiii

1 . The Emergence of Japanese Civilization 1

2. The Introduction of Buddhism 19

3. The Court at Its Zenith 48

4. The Advent of a New Age 77

5. The Canons of Medieval Taste 91

6. The Country Unified 140

7. The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture 164

8. Heterodox Trends 205

9. Encounter with the West 235

10. The Fruits of Modernity 271

1 1 . Culture in the Present Age 304

Notes 353

Glossary 363

Selected Bibliography 367

Index 373

This page intentionally I eft blank

Preface

More than a quarter of a century has passed since the publication
of Japanese Culture . With each edition, it has expanded in size. Thus,
whereas the first edition ended with World War II, the second edition in-
cluded a postwar chapter (which remains the book’s longest chapter).
When the University of Hawaii Press published the third edition in 1984,
it reset the entire text and allowed me to add material throughout. Once
again, in this fourth edition, the text has been reset and I have been able
to add extensive new material on subjects such as samurai values, Zen
Buddhism, the tea ceremony (chanoyu), Confucianism in the Tokugawa
period, the story of the forty-seven ronin , Mito scholarship in the early
nineteenth century, and mass culture and the comics in the present age.

As stated in the preface to the first edition, Japanese Culture is intended
as a survey, for the general reader, of Japanese culture, including reli-
gion, thought, the visual arts, literature, the theatre, the cinema, and
those special arts, such as the tea ceremony and landscape gardening,
that have been uniquely cherished in Japan. I have in particular sought
to relate cultural developments to political, social, and institutional trends
without burdening the text with an excess of the names, dates, and other
details of those trends.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my editor at the Univer-
sity of Hawaii Press, Patricia Crosby, who encouraged me to undertake
the revision and expansion of Japanese Culture for this fourth edition and
who has supported and assisted me in various projects for the press over
the years.

Honolulu P.V.

February 1999

Major Periods and Cultural Epochs
of Japanese History

Jomon period
Yayoi period
Tomb period
Age of Reform

Asuka epoch (552-645)

Hakuho epoch (645-710)

Nara period

Tempyo epoch (mid-eighth century)

Heian period

Jogan epoch (mid- to late ninth century)

Fujiwara epoch (tenth century to late eleventh century)
Kamakura period
Kemmu Restoration

ca. 10,000-300 b.c.
ca. 300 b.c.-a.d. 300
ca. 300-552
552-710

710-784

794—1 185

1185-1333

1333-1336

Muromachi (Ashikaga) period

Kitayama epoch (late fourteenth and early fifteenth
centuries)

Higashiyama epoch (second half of the fifteenth century)
Age of Unification

Azuchi-Momoyama epoch (1568-1600 or 1615)

Nambati epoch (late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries)

Tokugawa (Edo) period

Genroku epoch (ca. 1675-1725)

Bunka-Bunsei epoch (late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries)

Meiji period
Taisho period
Showa period
Heisei period

1336-1573

1568-1600

1600-1867

1868-1912

1912-1926

1926-1989

1989-

Chinese Dynasties since the Time
of Unification under the Han

Han dynasty

Period of the six dynasties

Sui dynasty

T’ang dynasty

Period of the five dynasties

Sung dynasty

Southern Sung dynasty (1 127-1279)
Yuan (Mongol) dynasty
Ming dynasty
Ch’ing (Manchu) dynasty

206 b.c.-a.d. 220
220-589
589-618
618-907
907-960
960-1279

1279-1368

1368-1644

1644-1911

This page intentionally I eft blank

Author's Notes

Japanese names: The order is family name followed by given name. Thus,
Tokugawa Ieyasu is Ieyasu of the Tokugawa family. Until about the early
thirteenth century, it was also common to use the possessive no (“of”) in
names — for example, Fujiwara no Michinaga was Michinaga “of” the
Fujiwara family.

Year-periods: Adopting the Chinese practice, the Japanese of premodern
times designated “year-periods” or “calendrical eras” that lasted, as they
saw fit, from a few months to several decades. Important events, such as
the Taika Reform of 645 and the Onin War of 1467-77, came to be
known by the year-periods in which they occurred or began. A number of
cultural or art epochs, including the Tempyo epoch of the eighth century
and the Genroku epoch of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth cen-
turies, also were identified by the year-periods with which they roughly
coincided. Beginning with the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the year-periods
have been made coterminous with the reigns of emperors.

Use of macrons: The macron is used in the transcribing of Japanese to
show when the vowels o and u should be prolonged in pronunciation. In
keeping with a common practice, I have omitted the macrons from such
well-known place names as Tokyo, Kyoto, and Honshu, and from histor-
ical terms like “daimyo” and “shogun,” which appear in most modern
English-language dictionaries and which I have used without italicization.

This page intentionally I eft blank

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Much mystery — and controversy — surrounds the origins of the Japanese
people. Before the end of World War II, it was generally believed that
human occupancy of Japan dated to only about 4000 b.c. and that the
inhabitants of that earliest period were Neolithic or New Stone Age peo-
ple. Then, in 1949, new archaeological finds dramatically revealed that
humans had lived in Japan from a much earlier time and that there had
been a Paleolithic or Old Stone Age before the New Stone Age. Today, a
conservative estimate of the date of the beginning of the Old Stone Age
is between 30,000 and 50,000 b.c. Some archaeologists, however, assert
that the age commenced as far back as about 600,000 b.c.1

During the glacial age (about 1,000,000-10,000 b.c.), when much of
the water of the earth’s Northern Hemisphere was drawn into polar ice
packs, Japan was connected in the west (Kyushu) and north (northern
Honshu and Hokkaido) to the Asian continent, and the present Japan Sea
was a lake. Very likely Japan’s first inhabitants crossed over from the con-
tinent by foot. In any case, better scientific dating of archaeological mate-
rials developed since the end of World War II, including radiocarbon dat-
ing, has established that the Old Stone Age, whenever it may have begun,
ended with the glacial age about 10,000 b.c. and was succeeded by the
New Stone Age.

Since the first discovery of Old Stone Age civilization, some five thou-
sand Old Stone Age sites have been uncovered all over Japan. These sites
typically yield roughly shaped stone tools and an assortment of human
bone fragments. Because no full skeletons have yet been found, it has
been difficult for archaeologists to make judgments about the racial char-
acter of the Old Stone Age Japanese. The rudimentary level of their lives
is perhaps best attested by the fact that, so far as we know, they did not
advance culturally to the point of making pottery. And it is for this reason
that archaeologists have labeled them, rather unpoetically, the “non-
pottery” people.

The beginning of the New Stone Age is now dated to about 10,000
b.c., when there was a great warming in the Northern Hemisphere, much
of the polar ice mass melted, and Japan evolved into an archipelago. In

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

the preceding Old Stone Age, people had shaped stones into tools by
chipping or flaking or had even used stones as tools just as they found
them. The main index marking the transition to the New Stone Age was
the appearance, from about 10,000 b.c., of stone tools of much higher
quality, including skillfully shaped and polished axes, knives, arrowheads,
and fish hooks.

Another major advance of the New Stone Age was the production of
pottery; and indeed, archeologists now date the beginning of pottery
making in Japan to the commencement of the age itself, or roughly
10,000 b.c. This means that, on the basis of what we know about the
origins of pottery making in other countries, the Japanese (or the occu-
pants of Japan during the New Stone Age) produced the world’s first
pottery. It is possible that future finds on the Asian continent — for
example, in China or Korea — will reveal pottery that antedates Japan’s
and that even served as models for the New Stone Age potters of Japan.
But, for the present, the Japanese stand as the first to have made pottery
not only in East Asia but in the world.

Japan’s New Stone Age pottery was earthenware shaped by hand in a
process known as coiling, whereby clay is formed into a rope and a vessel
is created by circling the rope around and around from the bottom up
and then smoothing out the surface to disguise the “coiling.” The earliest
type of pottery made in this manner was a simple, bullet-shaped cooking
vessel that was apparently inserted into sand or soft earth. Later pieces
were much more elaborate and had deeply impressed and intricate sur-
face patterns, widely flared rims, and thick handlelike appendages (fig. 1).
Because the most common pattern on New Stone Age pottery was
achieved by impressing cord or rope into the soft clay, archaeologists have
designated the New Stone Age itself, which lasted until about 400-300
b.c., the Jomon or, literally, “rope pattern” age.

The Jomon Japanese were primarily hunters, gatherers, and fishers.
They tended to move about with the seasons, although later in the age
they established at least semipermanent settlements. Many Jomon settle-
ments were near the coast, where their inhabitants had easy access
to food from the sea, especially shellfish, which they consumed vora-
ciously. Jomon remains were first discovered in modern times by an
American, E. S. Morse, who in 1877 uncovered “kitchen middens” (the
garbage mounds or refuse heaps of primitive people) at Omori south of
Tokyo. Because these middens were composed largely of discarded shells,
archaeologists called them “shell mounds” (kaizuka). These mounds are
of great value for several reasons. In addition to providing information
about the diet of the Jomon people (for example, there are many bones
of small animals as well as shells in the mounds) they also contain tools,
pottery, and other objects of Jomon life.

Jomon people lived first in caves and later in shallow pits covered with

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 1 Jomon pottery (courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

thatching. These pit dwellings (tateana) were uniformly small — a typical
tateana was about two feet deep and fifteen feet in diameter — and could
accommodate at most four or five people (that is, a nuclear family).
Jomon graves were also small; indeed they were merely holes into which
bodies, in flexed or fetal position, were inserted. Along with the pit dwell-
ings, these unpretentious graves provide proof that New Stone Age society
in Japan was essentially classless.

Among the most striking objects from the Jomon age are earthenware
figurines, known as dogu, that in their distorted representations of half-
human, half-beastlike beings seem to be the creation of minds absorbed
with superstition and primitive magic (fig. 2). A number of dogii depict
female creatures with prominent breasts and pregnant stomachs, physical
features that suggest these figurines were used in some sort of fertility
rites. Still other dogii , whose limbs appear to have been deliberately
broken off, were quite likely employed by medicine men for the purpose
of curing ailments of the arms and legs.

The Jomon period came to an end about 400-300 b.c. as the result of

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 2 Dogu figurine (The Metropolitan Museum , Gift of
Mr. and Mrs. Jerome Koizim, 1978)

major new cultural influences from the continent. By far the most im-
portant of these was wet-rice (paddy field) agriculture, a type of farming
that flourishes in central and south China (the colder climate of north
China is not hospitable to it) and that may have been transmitted almost
simultaneously at this time to both southern Korea and western Japan.2
Three hundred b.c. is historically close to the date (221 b.c.) when the
great civilization of north China, centered on the Yellow River, was uni-
fied for the first time by the Ch’in dynasty. It seems possible that im-
pulses from the Ch’in unification, which had been under way for many
years, spread outward to both Korea and Japan and, in the case of the
latter, brought the Yayoi period (ca. 300 b.c.-a.d. 300), so named be-
cause of the site in modern Tokyo — Yayoi — where the remains of this
phase of Japanese civilization were first discovered.

Before World War II, it was generally believed that the Yayoi period
was begun by a migration of people from the Asian continent via Korea,
and that the new “Yayoi people,” moving first eastward (to the Kanto
region of Honshu) and then northward, gradually displaced the Jomon

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

people and became the Japanese of historic times. More recently, how-
ever, scholars have come to believe that the shift from Jomon to Yayoi
was essentially cultural: that is, the Jomon people became the Yayoi
people under influences from China.3 (See the beginning of Chapter 3 for
more remarks about the possible relationship between the Jomon and
Yayoi peoples.)

With the introduction of agriculture, the Japanese moved into the allu-
vial lowlands, formed permanent farming communities, and became dif-
ferentiated into social classes. Rice, from this time on, became over-
whelmingly the main staple of the economy. It also exerted a profound
influence on society, since, in the form of paddy field production, it
required a great and unremitting input of physical labor. The units of
the agricultural world — the farming family and village — became tightly
organized groups, providing a bedrock stability to Japanese life at the
basic level that has persisted into modern times.

The use of metals, both bronze and iron, was also introduced to Japan
in the early Yayoi period. Bronze was employed primarily for ornamental
and iron for practical purposes. But probably the most important use to
which metal was put, as we shall see, was the making of weapons, which
brought a sharp increase in warfare and the consolidation of control over
ever larger territorial units in late Yayoi times.

The transition from Jomon to Yayoi brought important changes in pot-
tery making (fig. 3). The serene and elegant appearance of the new Yayoi
pottery suggests that the civilizing influences that brought new technol-
ogy to Japan in this age also advanced the mentality of its people. The
untamed spirit reflected in the shape and ornamentation of some Jomon
pottery and in the dogu figurines was either lost or suppressed by the
craftsmen of Yayoi. But perhaps the most striking difference between the
two kinds of pottery is that in Jomon the stress is on decoration, and in
Yayoi it is on form. Many Yayoi pieces have no decoration at all, whereas
others have bands of thinly incised geometric designs that contrast
sharply in their simplicity with the typically florid patterning of Jomon
pottery.

Pottery making in Japan, whose real origins lie in the Yayoi period, is
of great importance in cultural history not only because of its inherent
artistic worth but also because it is based on some of the most enduring
values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition. Most peoples, as they progress
technologically in the making of pottery from plain, unglazed clay pieces
to fine porcelains, tend to leave their earlier works in the past. The Japa-
nese are unusual in having retained through the ages a love for primitive
ceramics even as they have made progressively finer pottery, mainly
under the influence of China. The most impressive example of this love
for the primitive in pottery is to be found in the culture of tea, which
evolved during the medieval age.

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 3 Yayoi pottery (courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

In aesthetic terms, the cherishing of primitive pottery rests on the
value of naturalness, or the preference for things in their original, un-
altered states. For the artist or craftsman, naturalness means staying
close to his materials. Thus the maker of primitive pottery does not seek
to disguise the clay he uses; and the products of his work are admired
not only for their natural texture but also for the imperfections that inevit-
ably appear in “primitively” produced things. Another example of the
aesthetic taste of the Japanese for naturalness is to be found in the archi-
tecture of Shinto shrines, the wood of which is often left unpainted. In
this case, practicality is clearly sacrificed to aesthetics, since natural wood
shrines are much more susceptible than other kinds of structures to the
ravages of weathering.

Nearly all Jomon pottery was in the wide-mouthed hachi form and
appears to have been used mainly for cooking and serving food. The
Yayoi period brought a variety of new pottery forms, including the jar
(tsubo), designed for storage, especially of dried rice; the pot (kame)3 a

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

vessel^ similar to the hachi, that was also used in cooking; and the ped-
estaled takatsuki for the formal serving of food. All of these new pottery
forms emerged to meet the needs of the agricultural society that evolved
in Japan during the Yayoi period. Production of pottery for use in the
storage of rice is particularly deserving of note. Jomon had been a class-
less society primarily because it had no particular commodity that could
be accumulated or stored as wealth. In the Yayoi period, however, rice
itself became just such a commodity, and as it was accumulated and
stored the grain stratified society into differing classes according to wealth
as measured primarily by the possession (or nonpossession) of it. For the
rest of the premodern period, rice remained the principal standard of
wealth in Japan.

In addition to the archaeological record, knowledge of Japan in the
early centuries a.d. may be found in the dynastic histories of China. To
the Chinese of this age, the Japanese were one of a number of lesser
breeds of people existing beyond the borders of their great Middle King-
dom. Accordingly, they relegated the accounts of Japan to the sections
in their histories dealing with barbarian affairs.

The Chinese called Japan the land of Wa (which they wrote with a
character that means "stunted” or “dwarfed”) and, in their earliest
account of it, dating from about the first century b.c., described Wa
as consisting of “one hundred” — probably meaning a great many —
countries or tribes. They recorded that the people of Wa periodi-
cally sent missions to China during the first and second centuries
a.d., including one that visited the court of Emperor Kuang-wu of the
Later Han dynasty in 57 and received from the emperor a gold seal
investing Wa as a tribute-bearing state. In the late eighteenth century
(1784) a seal fitting the description of the one bestowed by Kuang-wu
was found by farmers near Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu. For the
great majority of scholars who accept it as authentic, this seal lends
important support to the general factuality of the Chinese dynastic
accounts of Wa.

In the late second and early third centuries there were disorders in
Wa that led to political consolidation and the establishment of a territo-
rial hegemony under a queen named Himiko (or Pimiko). The Chinese
observed that

[Himiko] occupied herself with magic and sorcery, bewitching the people.
Though mature in age, she remained unmarried. She had a younger brother
who assisted her in ruling the country. After she became the ruler, there were
few who saw her. She had one thousand women as attendants, but only one
man. He served her food and drink and acted as a medium of communica-
tion. She resided in a palace surrounded by towers and stockades, with
armed guards in a state of constant vigilance.4

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Himiko’s authority was apparently based on her religious or magical
powers and probably derived from the shamanism of northeastern Asia
that is known to have been widely disseminated in early Japan. She is
described in the above account as a mediator (shaman) between the
people and their gods, and as such may well have been among the first
to perform what later became the most sacred function of the Japanese
sovereign. According to the mythology, the ruling dynasty of Japan is
descended from the Sun Goddess (Amaterasu), the supreme deity or
kami of the Shinto pantheon, and only a duly selected sovereign from this
dynasty is qualified to perform the rites of communion with her that are
essential to governing the country.

The territorial hegemony over which Himiko presided was called
Yamatai, and even today scholars hotly dispute where its seat was
located. The problem is that the instructions in the Chinese dynastic
accounts (specifically, the History of the Kingdom of Wei, compiled about
297) of how to get to Yamatai from the continent (Korea) are wrong.
The instructions guide us smoothly enough across the Korean Straits to
northern Kyushu, but then say to turn south and go a series of distances
that, if taken, would lead into the Pacific Ocean. Scholars have long
contended that either the instructions should have said to turn east in-
stead of south, thereby leading to the vicinity of modern Nara and Kyoto
in the central provinces, or the distances given are wrong and the seat of
Yamatai was somewhere in northern Kyushu.

If Yamatai had its seat in the central provinces, it would indicate that,
by at least the late 230s, a hegemony had already been established linking
this region with northern Kyushu, and Himiko, as Yamatai ’s titular hege-
mon, was able to send missions to China on behalf of all of Wa. If, on
the other hand, the seat of Yamatai was in northern Kyushu, it would
suggest that Himiko ’s influence probably extended over a much more
limited area, possibly only northern Kyushu itself.

Some of the descriptions in the Chinese dynastic histories about the
customs of Wa are intriguingly similar to the practices or habits of the
Japanese today. For example, the Wa people paid deference to their
superiors by squatting or kneeling with both hands on the ground; they
clapped their hands in worship; and they placed great store in ritual
purification.

Apart from such observations about worshipful clapping and ritual
purification, we know little about the evolution of those religious beliefs
of ancient Japan that collectively came to be called Shinto (the way of
the kami or gods) to distinguish them from Buddhism, which was intro-
duced to Japan from Korea about the middle sixth century. In Shinto we
can observe a primitive religion of the sort that elsewhere in the world
has been absorbed by the universal faiths but that in remote and paro-
chial Japan has been perpetuated into modern times. The central feature

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

of Shinto is its belief in kami, a polytheistic host that, on the one hand,
animistically inhabits nature and, on the other hand, is intimately asso-
ciated with people and their most basic units of social organization, such
as the family and the farming village (fig. 4). The very word kami has
the connotation of “upper” or “above,” and not that of “transcendent.”
Probably the most famous definition of it is the one given by the eigh-
teenth-century scholar and Shinto revivalist Motoori Norinaga (1730-
1801):

The word kami refers, in the most general sense, to all divine beings of
heaven and earth that appear in the classics. More particularly, the kami are
the spirits that abide in and are worshipped at the shrines. In principle
human beings, birds, animals, trees, plants, mountains, oceans — all may be
kami. According to ancient usage, whatever seemed strikingly impressive,
possessed the quality of excellence, or inspired a feeling of awe was called
kami.5

Shinto, which developed no significant notion of the fate of the life
spirit after death, has from its origins been overwhelmingly concerned
with existence in this world. The kami , for the most part, are associated
with life as a vital, creative force; and in this sense Shinto contrasts
sharply with Buddhism, which takes a darkly pessimistic view of the
world as a place of suffering and misery. Shinto also has little concept of
the ethical as a means to measure human behavior, but instead considers
the misdeeds of people, along with various physical defilements and nat-
ural disasters, to be essentially visitations from without that must be
handled by special rites, such as exorcism and purification. Purification
or lustration (of a kind presumably dating back at least to the time of the
Chinese observations on the people of Wa) is particularly important in
Shinto; in fact, it is the principal act performed at Shinto shrines both
by worshipers and by priests.

There are basically two kinds of purification rituals in Shinto, the ex-
ternal and the internal. External or physical purification (kessai) is most
commonly done by the worshiper, upon visiting a shrine, by the symbolic
act of rinsing his mouth and hands with water. Internal purification or
exorcism (harai), on the other hand, is exclusively the preserve of the
priest, who normally performs it by waving a wand. When a priest thus
purifies a person, it is thought that his spirit is restored to its original,
pristine and upright nature.

A practice in Shinto that has always been an important feature of the
social lives of the Japanese is the matsuri or festival. In the most basic of
such festivals a kami (represented by some object or emblem) is trans-
ported in a portable shrine, usually on the shoulders of a team of young
men, in a journey through a village or about a locale. The mood is one
of joy and celebration: it is an occasion for entertainment and pleasure.

Fig. 4 Wooden statue of a Shinto deity, 12th- 13th century (Honolulu
Academy of Arts, Gift of Robert Aller ton, 1964 [3311. 1})

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

and the young men, often well fortified with sake, take their honored
guest on an exhilarating ride, shouting and careening along.

Although most kami are benign, if not beneficent, there are also
malevolent deities and spirits (tatarigami) that must be carefully handled
and, when necessary, propitiated. The amalgam of folk beliefs about
malevolent spirits, however, cannot be ascribed solely to the native reli-
gion of Shinto. Such beliefs were also introduced in early times from the
continent, perhaps most conspicuously with shamanism. We have already
noted that the third-century Queen Himiko was probably a shaman or
mediator with the gods. But there are also shamans of a more mundane
type who have been used throughout Japanese history to deal with malev-
olent spirits. Such a shaman, most often a woman, typically enters into
an ecstatic state — called “ kami possession” (kamigakari) — and allows an
evil spirit to enter her body, where it can be induced to reveal why it is
causing trouble and what can be done to appease it. Shamans of this
sort have appeared frequently in the historical records and in literature,
and in recent times certain of them have even become the founders of
new religious sects through the revelations they have made while in
states of kami possession.

Although Shinto may be said to lack a code of personal ethics, it has
always been associated with an idea, makoio or sincerity, that has been
probably the most important guide to behavior in Japanese history. The
three great systems of religion and belief in premodern Japan were
Shinto, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Whereas Buddhism and Confu-
cianism were imports from China (from about the mid-sixth century),
Shinto was, of course, native. In later centuries, people tended to cate-
gorize these systems by observing, rather simplistically, that Buddhism
was “other-worldly” or “metaphysical,” Confucianism “rational,” and
Shinto “emotional.” Scholars of the late seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies went so far as to say that the “original” nature of the Japanese was
an emotional, Shinto nature, and that Buddhist metaphysics and Confu-
cian rationality should be rejected as alien. Apart from the beliefs of these
Neo-Shinto scholars of later times, we can observe that the Japanese have
always placed great store in the emotional side of human nature, and
that sincerity of feeling and action has more often than not taken prece-
dence in their minds over other possible values, such as “truth,” “justice,”
or “the good.” This is not to suggest that sincerity is necessarily incom-
patible with these other values, but simply that sincerity, the ethic of the
emotions, has been a dominant — if not predominant — strain in the Japa-
nese sentiment throughout the ages.

Shinto has an exceptionally rich mythology, which has been recorded
primarily in two works, Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon Shoki
(or Nihongi [Chronicles of Japan]) that were compiled in the early eighth
century (712 and 720) and are the oldest extant books written by Japa-

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

nese. These works will be discussed in the next chapter; let us note here
some of the principal myths in the Shinto tradition.

The beginning of the mythology, a creation story, was probably com-
posed at a relatively late date, perhaps in the seventh century, under the
influence of Chinese ideas of cosmology. We are told that in the begin-
ning the world was in a state of chaos, but gradually, in the manner of
Chinese yin-yang dualism, the light particles of matter rose to form
heaven and the heavy particles settled to become the earth (or, more pre-
cisely, an oceanlike body of viscous substance). Deities (kami) material-
ized and, after the passage of seven generations, the brother and sister
gods Izanagi and Izanami were instructed to create a “drifting land.”
Izanagi thereupon thrust his spear into the ocean mass below, and as he
withdrew it brine dripping from the tip formed a small island. Izanagi
and Izanami proceeded together by means of a heavenly bridge to the
island and there begot not only the remainder of the islands of Japan but
also a vast number of other deities. In the process of giving birth to the
fire deity, Izanami was badly burned and descended to the nether world.
The ostensibly gallant Izanagi, in a sequence of the myth startlingly
similar to the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, went to fetch her but
was so repelled by the appearance of Izanami’s decaying and maggot-
infested body that he hastily retreated. To purify himself (in the finest
Shinto tradition), Izanagi went to a stream and, as he disrobed and
cleansed his body, he produced a new flock of kami. Among these were
the Sun Goddess, who sprang into being as Izanagi washed his left eye,
and Susanoo, the god of storms, who appeared from his nose.

The Sun Goddess was appointed to rule over the plain of high heaven,
and thus became the preeminent figure in the Shinto pantheon. Her
brother Susanoo, on the other hand, was given dominion over the sea. A
fretful and ill-tempered creature, Susanoo insisted upon visiting the Sun
Goddess in heaven to say good-bye before taking up his post. Upon arriv-
ing in heaven, Susanoo committed a series of offenses against his sister,
such as breaking down her field-dividers, destroying her looms, and defe-
cating in her palace. Outraged, the Sun Goddess, in a solar-eclipse type
of myth sequence, secluded herself in a cave and plunged the world into
darkness. To lure her out, the other deities of heaven prepared a pro-
gram of riotous entertainment and placed a cock atop a perch, or torii,
before the cave to signal its commencement. When the Sun Goddess, her
curiosity aroused, peeped out, she was seized by a strong-armed deity
who pulled her into the open and thereby restored light to the world.

The torii, or bird perch, in this so-called “rock cave” story became, it
is believed, the entranceway to the Shinto shrine of historical times. The
torii is the most familiar symbol of Shinto and can be found at all shrines,
no matter how small (fig. 5). Many local shrines, indeed, appear to con-
sist of little more than torii.

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 5 Torn at Miyajima in the Inland Sea (Consulate General of Japan, New York)

After securing the submission of certain tribal deities in the “land of
luxuriant rice fields” (i.e., Japan), the Sun Goddess dispatched her grand-
son, Ninigi, to this land, commanding him:

Do thou, my August Grandchild, proceed thither and govern it. Go! and
may prosperity attend thy dynasty, and may it, like Heaven and Earth,
endure for ever.6

To seal her command, the Sun Goddess bestowed upon Ninigi a sacred
regalia, consisting of a Chinese-style bronze mirror, a sword, and a curved
jewel (magatama). Objects similar to those of the regalia have been found
in gravesites dating from the middle Yayoi period, and appear to have
symbolized local tribal rulership. In historical times, however, the mirror,
sword, and curved jewel have been used exclusively as tokens of the right
of the imperial family to rule. The mirror has been especially treasured
because it is believed — or was believed, until the end of World War II — to
represent the kami- body of the Sun Goddess, According to the mythology,
it was installed in a Shinto shrine at Ise after an emperor confessed that
he felt uneasy about having it nearby in the palace. The supreme sanc-
tity of the Ise Shrine derives from the fact that since that time (or at least
from as early as we know) it has housed the sacred mirror of the regalia.

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Ninigi descended from heaven to a mountaintop in southeastern
Kyushu, but seems to have done little to assert his rule over the “land of
luxuriant rice fields.” It was his great-grandson Jimmu who, after con-
ducting a campaign to the central provinces, where he destroyed aborig-
inal enemies, performed rites to his ancestress, the Sun Goddess, that
signified his assumption of the status of first emperor of Japan. Some-
time in the early historical period (the late sixth or early seventh centu-
ries) the Japanese, under the influence of certain Chinese calendrical con-
siderations, calculated the date of Jimmu’s accession to the emperorship
to be 660 b.c.;7 and the authors of Kojiki and Nihon Shoki established, as
part of the mythology, the genealogy of an “unbroken line of sovereigns”
which, if accepted, would make the present emperor, Akihito, the 125th
in lineal descent from Jimmu. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests
that the historical ruling dynasty of Japan dates back only to the early
sixth century a.d. and was probably preceded by at least two other “impe-
rial dynasties.”

This evidence about earlier dynasties dates from approximately a.d.
300, when Japan entered what scholars call the tomb period because
of the earth and stone burial mounds (kofun) that were constructed
throughout much of the country from this time until the early seventh
century. Some of these burial mounds are simply converted hills or knolls
of land, but others are truly stupendous in size and must have required
great concentrations of labor. The larger tombs, many of them in a key-
hole shape possibly taken from similarly constructed tombs on the Asian
continent, are in the central provinces and are generally thought to be the
graves of rulers — possibly the successors to Queen Himiko of Yamatai —
who presided over a hegemony that included much, if not all, of central
and western Japan.

From the standpoint of art, the most important objects from the
tomb period are terra cotta figurines, usually several feet in height, known
as haniwa. Implanted on the slopes and tops of the burial mounds, the
haniwa represent a great variety of things, including people, animals,
houses, and boats (fig. 6). The mythology informs us that an emperor in
early times was so moved by the agonies of attendants and others buried
alive with deceased members of the imperial family that he inaugurated
the practice of using clay images in place of people on the occasion of
royal funerals. Although often cited to explain the origin of the haniway
this tale seems to have little basis in truth. No evidence has been found
that the Japanese actually engaged in this gruesome practice of live burial,
even though it was common in ancient China. More important, the
images of human beings do not appear until relatively late in the evolu-
tion of the haniwa. The earlier haniwa were simply plain cylinders. Per-
haps they were employed to reduce erosion or to mark off certain areas
on the burial mounds for ritual purposes. On the other hand, the later

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 6 Hanizva shamaness (courtesy of the Brooklyn
Museum , Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Marcus)

haniwa , which depict living beings and sundry commonplace objects,
indicate a new use of these images to reproduce in the afterlife a world
that was familiar to the deceased.

Apart from certain shamanistic female figurines, most of the haniwa
are entirely secular in appearance: that is, they have no religious or
magical aura about them. This may be a commentary on the simple,
direct outlook of the early inhabitants of Japan. A number of Japanese
scholars have asserted that the haniwa possess a quality they call heimei
— openness and candor — that reflects the native spirit of Japan before it
was altered by Confucian rationalism and the complex religious doc-
trines of Buddhism. Whether or not this is true, the haniwa are aestheti-
cally excellent examples of the Japanese preference, which we observed
in Yayoi pottery, for naturalness in the use of materials and for plain, un-
cluttered forms.

Beginning in the early 400s, there was a change in the funerary objects
of the burial mounds. Whereas the mounds until then had contained

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

things that were used mainly for ornamental and ritual purposes, includ-
ing many bronze pieces, the fifth century brought an increasing number
of more practical objects, such as tools and weapons of iron. Most strik-
ing was the appearance on the mounds of warrior and horse haniwa . The
Chinese dynastic histories make no mention of the existence of horses in
the land of Wa in earlier times, a fact which of course does not necessarily
mean that there were no such animals there before the fifth century. But
the depiction of horses as haniwa has lent support to the theory, ad-
vanced soon after World War II, that Japan was invaded in this period by
horse-riding warriors who, entering from Korea, conquered the country
and established themselves as its new ruling elite.

The horse-rider theory is an intriguing idea, especially when consid-
ered in conjunction with the movement of “barbarian” peoples on the
northeast Asian mainland during this same period.8 But it seems that
those who have advanced the theory have not paid sufficient attention to
all the archaeological evidence. As presented by its originator, Professor
Egami Namio, the theory rests squarely on the contention that there was
a “sudden” appearance of horse-rider grave goods and warrior and horse
haniwa in and on the great tombs in the late fourth century. Actually, as
noted above, such goods and haniwa did not appear until well into the
fifth century, and then their appearance was not sudden but gradual. The
Japanese did indeed, about this time, receive new knowledge of fighting
on horseback as well as the material accoutrements of such fighting, in-
cluding armor, helmets, and protective gear for horses; but these seem
clearly to have been imported by the Japanese themselves and not brought
to the islands by continental invaders.9

Whether or not it was founded by alien horseriders, a new dynasty
seems clearly to have arisen in the central provinces in the early 400s.
Judging from the fact that the very largest burial mounds date from this
time (the largest is that of the protohistorical “Emperor Nintoku,” which
covers an area 1 ,500 feet in length and is situated outside modern Osaka),
the new dynasty came into being with considerable force and power. The
dynasty’s power was used at least in part to pursue a policy of military
expansionism in Korea, where three states — Silla, Paekche, and Koguryo
— were struggling for hegemony. Japan may have established a military
colony or outpost called Mimana on the southern tip of Korea,10 and dur-
ing the fifth century Japanese rulers made requests of China on at least
five occasions for the confirmation of titles related to Japan’s involvement
in the Korean fighting, including “King of Wa” and “Generalissimo Who
Maintains Peace in the East Commanding With Battle-Ax All Military
Affairs.”11

The dynasty of the fifth century appears, in its turn, to have
been supplanted in the early sixth century by the ruling family that
became the imperial dynasty of historic times. This final dynastic tran-

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

Fig. 7 Ise Shrine (Consulate General of Japan, New York )

sition, which gave rise to the line of the Sun Goddess, occurred on the
eve of history — that is, within decades of the period, about mid-sixth
century, when the native records become generally reliable as factual
accounts.

The principal monument to the Sun Goddess is the Ise Shrine (fig. 7),
which houses her image, as noted, in the form of the mirror, the most
precious object of the imperial regalia. The Ise Shrine is made of soft-
textured, unpainted cypress, and is a splendid example of a shrine main-
tained in a “natural” state. Since antiquity it has been the custom to re-
build the structures of the Ise Shrine every twenty years in adjacent, alter-
nate sites (the last rebuilding was in 1993). No one knows the reason for
this unusual custom, although possibly it derives from the desire to pre-
serve the freshness of the wood and to avoid the warping and sagging to
which this kind of material is susceptible. The severely simple buildings
of the shrine, with their raised floors, thatched roofs, and crossed end-
rafters, show Shinto architecture at its best. Situated in lovely forest sur-
roundings, they give the feeling of great naturalness and tranquility, of a

The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

spirit somehow representative of Japan before the introduction of Bud-
dhism in the sixth century.

This style of architecture can be traced back to line drawings on rather
oversized bronze bells, known as dotaku, of the mid-Yayoi period and to
certain house hanizva of the age of burial mounds. The style is some-
times called “granary” (kura) construction, because its characteristic
structure, as seen in the buildings of Ise, was probably first used to store
rice. Later, it is believed, the same kind of structure was adapted to both
palace and shrine use.

The Introduction of Buddhism

The sixth century inaugurated an epoch of great vitality in East Asia.
After some three and a half centuries of disunion following the fall of the
Han dynasty in 220, China was at length reunited under the Sui dynasty
in 589. Although the T’ang replaced the Sui in 618, there was no further
disruption of national unity for another three centuries.

The period of disunion in China produced conditions favorable to the
spread of Buddhism, which had been introduced from India during the
first century a.d., and it was largely as a Buddhist country that China
entered its grand age of the T’ang dynasty (618-907). Buddhism had not
only secured great numbers of religious converts in China; it had come
to be regarded as virtually essential to the institutional centralization of
the country, and its themes dominated the world of the visual arts.

Under the T’ang, China enjoyed its greatest national flourishing in his-
tory. Its borders were extended to their farthest limits, and Chinese cul-
ture radiated outward to neighboring lands. In East Asia, both Korea and
Japan were profoundly influenced by T’ang China and underwent broad
centralizing reforms on the Chinese model.

At mid-sixth century, Japan was divided into a number of territories
controlled by aristocratic clans called uji. One clan — the imperial uji — had
its seat in the central provinces and enjoyed a status approximating that
of primus inter pares over most of the others, whose lands extended from
Kyushu in the west to the eastern provinces of the Kanto. In northern
Honshu, conditions were still unruly and barbarous.

Even at this time in Japanese history, there was a pronounced ten-
dency for the heads of the non-imperial uji to assume, as ministers at
court, much if not all of the emperor’s political powers. Although there
were a number of forceful sovereigns during the next few centuries,
Japan’s emperors have in general been noteworthy for the fact that they
have reigned but have not ruled.

The word “emperor” is actually misleading when discussing this an-
cient age, for the emperor we find presiding over the loosely associated
clans of the Yamato state in mid-sixth century appears, like a kami of
primitive Shinto, only to have been relatively superior to or elevated above

The Introduction of Buddhism

the leaders of the other clans. Not until the next century did the Japa-
nese, under the influence of Chinese monarchic ideas, transform their
sovereign into a transcendentally divine ruler, giving him the Chinese-
sounding title of tenno that is always translated into English as emperor.

Although the Japanese thus created an exalted emperor figure on the
Chinese model, they did not adopt the key Chinese Confucian theory of
the emperor ruling through a mandate from heaven. A corollary to this
theory was that a mandate granted by heaven to a virtuous ruler could
be withdrawn from an unvirtuous one, and it was on the basis of this
rationale that the Chinese justified or explained the periodic changes of
dynasty in their history. In Japan, on the other hand, the native mytho-
logical assertion (noted in the last chapter) that the Sun Goddess had
granted a mandate to the imperial family to rule eternally was retained,
and the emperor line of the sixth century was thus enabled to achieve its
extraordinary continuity of unbroken rulership throughout historic times
until the present day.

Tradition has it that Buddhism was officially introduced to Japan from
the Korean kingdom of Paekche in 552. 1 Since about a third of Japan’s
aristocracy was by that time of foreign descent, the Japanese undoubtedly
already knew about Buddhism as well as the other major features of con-
tinental civilization. Nevertheless, it was over the issue of whether or not
to accept Buddhism that a larger debate concerning national reform arose
at the Japanese court in the second half of the sixth century.

Buddhism was at least a thousand years old when it entered Japan. It
had emerged in northern India with the teachings of Gautama (ca. 563-
483 b.c.), the historic Buddha, and had spread throughout the Indian
subcontinent and into Southeast and East Asia. But it had become a
complex, universalistic religion that embraced doctrines far removed from
the basic tenets of its founder. Gautama, in his Four Noble Truths, had
taught that (1) the world is a place of suffering; (2) suffering is caused
by human desires and acquisitiveness; (3) something can be done to end
suffering; and (4) the end of suffering and achievement of enlightenment
or buddhahood lies in following a prescribed program known as the
Eightfold Noble Path (right views, right intention, right speech, right
action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right con-
centration). For most people, following the Eightfold Noble Path prob-
ably would not be easy. The doctrine of karma, or cause and effect, held
that acts in previous existences were likely to have enmeshed one tightly
in the web of desire and suffering and to have predestined one to at least
several more cycles of death and rebirth.

These fundamental teachings of Buddhism, which the contemporary
West has found appealing as a psychology, were greatly augmented some
five centuries after Gautama’s death with the advent of Mahayana, the
Buddhism of the “Greater Vehicle.” The believers in Mahayana depre-

The Introduction of Buddhism

catingly called the earlier form of Buddhism Hinayana, or the “Lesser
Vehicle,” since it was essentially a body of doctrine designed to instruct
individuals in how to achieve release from the cycle of life and death.2
This, the Mahayanists asserted, implied that buddhahood was really open
only to those with a special capacity to follow correctly the Eightfold
Noble Path. They claimed — and indeed produced ancient scriptures to
“prove” — that just before his death Gautama had revealed the ultimate
truth that all living things have the potentiality for buddhahood. The
Mahayanists, moreover, came increasingly to regard Gautama as a tran-
scendent, rather than simply a mortal, being and gave reverence to a
new figure, the bodhisattva or “buddha-to-be,” who has met all the re-
quirements for buddhahood but in his great compassion has postponed
his entry into that state in order to assist others in their quest for release
from the cycle of life and death. In contrast to Hinayana, which could be
considered “selfish” because it urged people to devote themselves solely
to attainment of their own enlightenments, Mahayana preached universal
love, through the ideal of the bodhisattva, for all beings, animal as well
as human.

The Mahayana school of Buddhism, which had its greatest flourishing
in East Asia, also accumulated a vast and bewildering pantheon of bud-
dhas and other exalted beings, some of whom were taken from Hinduism
and even from the religions of the Near East. In an effort to categorize
and account for the roles of these myriad deities, the Mahayanists for-
mulated the theory of the “three forms” of the buddha: his all-embracing,
universal, or cosmic form, his transcendent form, in which he might ap-
pear as any one of many heavenly figures, such as the healing buddha
(in Japanese, Yakushi), the buddha of the future (Miroku), and the
buddha of the boundless light (Amida); and his transformation form, or
the body he assumed when he existed on earth as Gautama. Without
knowledge of this theory of the three forms, one cannot understand the
interrelationship among the various Buddhist sects that appeared succes-
sively in Japanese history.

It is difficult to gauge the precise impact of Buddhism in Japan during
the first century or so after its introduction. In China, it had already pro-
liferated into a number of abstruse metaphysical sects, within both the
Hinayana and Mahayana schools, that could scarcely have appealed to the
Japanese beyond a small circle of intellectuals at court. As others outside
this circle gradually became aware of Buddhism, they apparently regarded
it at first as a new and potent form of magic for ensuring more abundant
harvests and for warding off calamities. They also responded directly and
intuitively to the wonders of Buddhist art as these were displayed in the
sculpture, painting, and temple architecture brought to Japan. More-
over, the Japanese probably accepted with little difficulty the validity of
Buddhism’s most fundamental premises: that all things are impermanent,

The Introduction of Buddhism

suffering is universal, and man is the helpless victim of his fate. People
in many ages have held these or similar propositions to be true, and we
should not be surprised to find the Japanese of this period accepting
them in the persuasive language of Buddhism.

Possibly the strongest feeling the Japanese of the seventh and eighth
centuries came to have about Buddhism was that it was an essential
quality of higher civilization. It is ironic that this religion, which in its
origins viewed the world with extreme pessimism and gave no thought
to social or political reform, should enter Japan from China as the carrier
of such multifarious aspects of civilization, including the ideal of state
centralization.

It is impossible to explain in a few words, or perhaps even in many,
how primitive Shinto managed to survive the influx of Buddhism. Part
of the answer lies in the unusual tolerance of Eastern religious thought
in general for “partial” or “alternative” truths and its capacity to synthe-
size seemingly disparate beliefs and manifestations of the divine. In Japan,
for example, the principal kami of Shinto came to be regarded as Bud-
dhist deities in different forms, and Shinto shrines were even amalga-
mated with Buddhist temples. Another reason why the Japanese through-
out the ages have with little or no difficulty considered themselves to be
both Shintoists and Buddhists is that the doctrines of the two religions
complement each other so neatly. Shinto expresses a simple and direct
love of nature and its vital reproductive forces, and regards death simply
as one of many kinds of defilement. Buddhism, on the other hand, is
concerned with life’s interminable suffering and seeks to guide living
beings on the path to enlightenment. It is fitting that even today in Japan
the ceremonies employed to celebrate such events as birth and marriage
are Shinto, whereas funerals and communion with the dead are within
the purview of Buddhism.

The dispute in Japan in the mid-sixth century over whether or not to
accept Buddhism, and at the same time to undertake national reforms,
divided the Japanese court into two opposing camps. One consisted of
families which, as Shinto ritualists and elite imperial guards, felt most
threatened by the changes Buddhism portended; the other camp, includ-
ing the Soga family, took a progressive position in favor of Buddhism and
reform. In the late 580s, the Soga prevailed militarily over their oppo-
nents and, further strengthened by marriage ties to the imperial family,
inaugurated an epoch of great renovation in Japan.

The most important leader of the early years of reform was Prince
Shotoku (574-622), who with Soga blessing became crown prince and
regent for an undistinguished empress (fig. 8). Shotoku has been greatly
idealized in history, and it is difficult to judge how much credit he truly
deserves for the measures and policies attributed to him. Yet, he seems
ardently to have loved learning and probably he was instrumental in ex-

Fig. 8 Lacquered wooden statue of Prince Shotoku, Edo period (Honolulu
Academy of Arts, Gift of Nathan V Hammer, 1953 [1804.1])

The Introduction of Buddhism

panding the relations with Sui China that were critical at this time to the
advancement of Japanese civilization. Quite likely it was also Shotoku who
wrote the note to the Sui court in 607 that began: “From the sovereign
of the land of the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting
sun.” The Sui emperor did not appreciate this lack of respect and refused
to reply; but the note made an important point. In earlier centuries, rulers
of the land of Wa, such as Himiko of Yamatai, had sent missions to
China. Henceforth, however, Japan intended to uphold its independence
and would not accept the status of humble subordination expected of
countries that sent tribute to mighty China.

Formerly, the Japanese had called their country Yamato, but some-
time in the seventh century they adopted the designation of Nihon (or
Nippon), written with the Chinese characters for “sun” and “source.”
Apparently they hoped that this designation, derived from the fact that
Japan’s location in the sea to the east made it the “source of the sun,”
would give them greater prestige in the eyes of the Chinese, Whether or
not it did, eventually it was the Chinese pronunciation of Nihon — Jihpen
— that was transmitted back to Europe by Marco Polo in the thirteenth
century and incorporated into the European tongues in forms like the
English “Japan.”

The Japanese dispatched a total of four missions to Sui China during
the period 600-614 and fifteen to T’ang between 630 and 838. The
larger missions usually consisted of groups of about four ships that trans-
ported more than five hundred people, including official envoys, stu-
dents, Buddhist monks, and translators. Some of these visitors remained
abroad for long periods of time — up to thirty or more years — and some
never returned. The trip was exceedingly dangerous, and the fact that so
many risked it attests to the avidity with which the Japanese of this age
sought to acquire the learning and culture of China.

Although there are no replicas or contemporary drawings of the ships
used in the missions to Sui and T’ang, we know that their sail and rudder
systems were primitive and that they were obliged to rely on the seasonal
winds. They usually left in the spring, when the prevailing winds were
westward, and returned in the winter, when the winds blew to the east.
The shortest route to the continent was across the 1 1 5-mile channel that
separates Kyushu from southern Korea. But sometimes the Japanese
ships were blown off course and drifted far down the Chinese coast. Dur-
ing most of the seventh century, when relations with Korea were poor, the
Japanese set sail directly for South China, although the passage was longer
and more difficult. The return trip, which almost always began from the
mouth of the Yangtze River, was the most treacherous of all. A miscalcu-
lation or an accidental alteration in course could carry the ships into the
vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Often they landed on islands in the Ryukyu
chain and were obliged to make their way home as best they could.

The Introduction of Buddhism

Dangerous as they were, the missions to China from the seventh
through the mid-ninth centuries were essential to the establishment of
Japan’s first centralized state. The Japanese borrowed freely from a civi-
lization that, at least in material and technological terms, was vastly supe-
rior to their own. Yet Japan’s cultural borrowing was sufficiently selective
to bring about the evolution of a society which, although it owed much to
China, became unique in its own right.

The influence of Korea in this transmission of Chinese civilization to
Japan has not yet received adequate attention among scholars. During
the first century or so a.d., Japan’s relations with Korea had been close,
and various Japanese tribal states had dispatched missions to China via
the Han Chinese military commanderies in Korea. Sometime in the late
fourth century, as observed in the last chapter, Japan established Mimana
on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula; and for the next two hun-
dred years Japanese armies were involved in the endless struggles for su-
premacy among Korea’s three kingdoms of Paekche, Silla, and Koguryo.
By the sixth century, Japan had come in general to support Paekche —
which is credited with officially introducing Buddhism to the Yamato
court in 552 — against the rising might of Silla. But Japan’s efforts were
not sufficient to alter the trend of events in Korea. Silla destroyed
Mimana in 562, Paekche in 663, and Koguryo in 668; it thereby unified
Korea as a centralized state on the lines of T’ang China, much like the
newly reformed state that was emerging in Japan during the same period.

Koreans and Chinese had migrated to Japan from at least the begin-
ning of the fifth century. But during Silla’s rise to power the number of
immigrants from the continent — especially refugees from Paekche and
Koguryo — increased substantially, as we can tell from accounts of how
they were given land and allowed to settle in different parts of the country.
Throughout the seventh century, which was of course the great age of
reform, these Korean immigrants played a vital role as scribes, craftsmen,
and artists in the advancement of culture and civilization in Japan.

Prince Shotoku and other Japanese intellectuals of the early reform
period studied not only Buddhism but also the teachings of Chinese Con-
fucianism. Like Buddhism, Confucianism was about a millenium old
when it entered Japan and it had expanded greatly beyond the simple
humanism of Confucius (551-479 b.c.) and his followers. The early Con-
fucianists were concerned with man in society, and not with metaphysical
speculation: they preached the cultivation of virtue and its application to
public service. In his famous Seventeen-Article Constitution of 604,
Prince Shotoku, in addition to calling for the reverence of Buddhism,
sought also to propagate Confucian values among the Japanese.3 Indeed,
the Constitution is mainly a Confucian document. Although it may ap-
pear to be a collection of simplistic maxims — for example, that harmony
should be prized (Article I) and that ministers should obey imperial com-

The Introduction of Buddhism

mands (III), behave decorously (IV), reject covetous desires (V), and
attend court early in the morning (VIII) — it is the first statement in Japa-
nese history of the need for ethical government. Addressed primarily to
Japan’s ministerial class, the Constitution, in characteristic Confucian
fashion, offers general principles of guidance for rule by moral suasion
rather than compulsion, which requires detailed laws with specified
punishments.

Scholars have long questioned whether the Seventeen-Article Consti-
tution, which appears in Nihon Shoki , a work compiled more than a cen-
tury later, could truly have been written by Prince Shotoku, inasmuch as
it contains ideas and principles that the Japanese were not likely to have
stressed or adopted until the late seventh or early eighth centuries, when
state centralization, based on continued borrowing from the continent,
was more advanced. Reference to the office of “provincial governor,” for
example, seems anachronistic, since that office was not established until
the late 600s. Also questionable, in the minds of some scholars, is
whether the principle of supreme imperial rule as set forth in the follow-
ing articles of the Constitution could have been articulated and sub-
scribed to by the Japanese as early as 604: “When you receive imperial
commands, fail not scrupulously to obey them. The lord is Heaven, the
vassal is Earth. Heaven overspreads, and Earth upbears. When this is so,
the four seasons follow their due course, and the powers of Nature obtain
their efficacy” (III); and “In a country there are not two lords; the people
have not two masters. The sovereign is the master of the people of the
whole country” (XII).

These are lofty Chinese ideas about emperorship, which hold that the
emperor not only enjoyed absolute authority over all the people but, in
the proper exercise of his office, was essential to the basic functioning of
nature itself. Nor is anything said in these or other articles of the Consti-
tution about the native deities, the kami> whose supreme representative,
Amaterasu the Sun Goddess, is said by Kojiki and Nihon Shoki , as we
have seen, to have mandated the imperial family’s right to rule forever.
In other words, the Constitution is silent about what subsequently be-
came the unassailable basis for the legitimacy of single-dynasty rule in
Japan: Amaterasu’s mandate. During the early and middle seventh cen-
tury the Japanese appear to have experimented with various ideas, drawn
from Confucianism and Buddhism as well as Shinto, to justify imperial
rule. Probably not until the late seventh and early eighth centuries did
they finally settle on the Shinto interpretation, as reflected in Amaterasu’s
mandate, and codify it for all future generations in Kojiki and Nihon
Shoki

Despite Prince Shotoku’s efforts to stimulate central reform, very little
of real significance could be achieved so long as the aristocratic clans con-
tinued to exercise almost complete autonomy over their lands and the

The Introduction of Buddhism

people on them. After Shotoku's death in 622, the Soga, who had been
the progressive advocates of Buddhism and the adoption of Chinese cul-
ture a half-century earlier, became the chief obstacles to reform of the
decentralized uji system. In the early 640s, there formed at court an anti-
Soga faction that included an imperial prince, leaders of various minis-
terial houses, and men who had studied in China. In 645 this group
forcibly overthrew the Soga, reasserted the supremacy of the throne (the
Soga were accused of having plotted to supplant the imperial family),
and instituted the reform of Taika (“Great Change”).

The Taika Reform was essentially a land reform patterned on the in-
stitutions of T'ang China. Although a paucity of records makes it im-
possible to determine just how extensively it was carried out, the intent
of the Reform was to nationalize all agricultural land — that is, to make it
the emperor's land — and to render all the people of the country direct
subjects of the throne. Land was then to be parceled out in equal plots
to farmers to work during their lifetimes. Upon the death of a farmer,
his plot would revert back to the state for redistribution.

This is a gross oversimplification of the provisions of the Taika Reform,
but it will suffice to show the idealistic concept of land equalization
upon which the Reform rested. This concept had evolved from Confu-
cian egalitarianism, which held that the equal division of land would
render the people content and harmonious. Equality, however, was to
apply only to the lower, peasant class of society. Members of the aristoc-
racy were to receive special emoluments of land based on considerations
such as rank, office, and meritorious service. In this way, the aristocracy
was enabled to remain about as privileged economically as it had been
before the Reform.

In practice, then, the equal-field system of the Taika Reform was only
equal for some people. Moreover, its conscientious implementation
would have required an administrative organization far more elaborate
than Japan possessed in this age. Perhaps we should marvel that the
system worked as effectively as it did; yet within a century it had begun
to decay. The aristocratic families, along with Buddhist temples and
Shinto shrines, started to accumulate private estates that were in many
wfays similar to the territorial holdings of the pre-Taika uji . (We may note
that the equal-field system fared little better in T'ang China, the land of
its birth. After the failure of this system later during the T’ang, China
never again in premodern times attempted to nationalize land and parcel
it out by allotment at the local level to individuals or families.)

Another major act of reform was the promulgation by the court, in
702, of the Taiho (“Great Treasure”) Code, which specified the central
and provincial offices of the new government (some of which were al-
ready functioning) and set forth general laws of conduct for the Japanese
people. Also modeled on T'ang, the Taiho Code provided Japan with an

The Introduction of Buddhism

elaborate and symmetrical bureaucratic structure of the sort that had
evolved over a millennium or more in China Although it functioned
smoothly enough through most of the eighth century, it ultimately proved
too weighty and inflexible for Japan in this early stage of its historical de-
velopment. Beginning in the ninth century, new offices that were opened
outside the provisions of the Taiho Code successively became the real
centers of national power in Japan.

In 710 the court moved to the newly constructed city of Nara, which
remained the capital of Japan until 784. Before this move, the site of the
court had often been shifted, usually in and around the central provinces.
Some claim that the Shinto view of death as a defilement — and the death
of a sovereign as the defilement of an entire community — was the main
reason for this constant moving about. But another likely reason is that
the loose control of the Yamato court over the territorial uji in earlier cen-
turies necessitated its frequent transfer from place to place for strategic
purposes. When the Sega became politically dominant in the late sixth
century, they established the court at Asuka to the south of present-day
Nara, where their seat of territorial power was located.

The epoch from the introduction of Buddhism in 552 until the Taika
Reform of 645 is generally known in art history as the Asuka period.
Most, if not all, of the Buddhist statuary, painting, and temple architec-
ture of the Asuka period was produced by Chinese and Korean crafts-
men. It is therefore not until a later age that we can speak of the true
beginnings of Japanese Buddhist art. Nevertheless, the treasures of the
Asuka period, which are in the manner of China’s Six Dynasties era
(220-589), are of inestimable value not only because of their individual
merits but also because they constitute the largest body of Six Dynasties-
style art extant. Owing to warfare and other vicissitudes, few examples
remain in China or Korea.

Although the first Buddhist temples in Japan were constructed by the
Soga in the late sixth century, none has survived. Of the buildings still
standing, by far the oldest — and indeed the oldest wooden buildings in
the world — are at the Horyuji Temple, located to the southwest of Nara.
Originally constructed in 607 under the patronage of Prince Shotoku, the
Horyuji may have been partly or entirely destroyed by fire in 670 and
rebuilt shortly after the turn of the century. Even so, it contains buildings
that clearly antedate those of any other temple in Japan.

Buddhist temples of this age were arranged in patterns known as garan.
Although the garan varied in the number and arrangement of their struc-
tures, they usually had certain common features: a roofed gallery in the
form of a square or rectangle, with an entrance gate in the center of its
southern side, that enclosed the main compound of the temple; a so-
called golden hall to house the temple’s principal images of devotion; a
lecture hall; and at least one pagoda, a type of building derived from the

Fig. 10 Golden Hall of the Horyuji Temple (photograph by Joseph Shulman)

The Introduction of Buddhism

Indian stupa and originally intended to contain the relic of a Buddhist
saint. At the Horyuji, the golden hall and a single, five-storied pagoda are
located to the right and left inside the entrance gate, and the lecture hall
is to the rear of the compound, actually integrated into the northern side
of the gallery (figs. 9-10). The chief characteristics of the golden hall are
its raised stone base and its hipped and gabled upper roof; as probably
the oldest of the Horyuji buildings, it is especially representative of the
Buddhist architectural style of the Six Dynasties period.

Among the statuary in the golden hall is a trinity of figures in bronze,
set in relief against flaming body halos. According to an inscription, this
was cast in 623 to commemorate the death of Prince Shotoku the year
before (fig. 11). It shows the historical Buddha, Gautama (in Japanese,
Shaka), flanked by two attendant bodhisattvas. The Buddha is seated

Fig. 1 1 Shaka trinity at the Horyuji Temple (Asuka-en)

The Introduction of Buddhism

cross-legged on a dais with his clothing draped in the stylized waterfall
pattern of the Six Dynasties period. He also strikes one of the many
mudras or special hand positions of Buddhist iconography (the upraised
hand here gives assurance against fear and the open palm is a sign of
charity); and he has a protuberance on his head and a third eye that indi-
cate extraordinary knowledge and vision and are among some twenty-
three bodily signs introduced by the Mahayana Buddhists to indicate
Gautama’s superhuman qualities. The expression on the faces of all three
figures of the trinity is that known as the “archaic smile,” whose imper-
sonality and vague mysteriousness contrast strikingly with the unabashed
frankness we noted in the countenances of many of the early native
haniwa figurines of human beings.

The bodhisattvas stand on pedestals of lotus blossoms and are attired
in the sort of princely garb that Gautama wore before he renounced the
world. In the Buddhist tradition, the lotus, which may be found floating
on the surface of the murkiest water, stands for purity. It can also sym-
bolize the universe, with each of its petals representing a separate, con-
stituent world.

Two excellent examples of wooden sculpture from the Asuka period
are the figure in the Horyuji of the bodhisattva Kannon, known as the
Kudara Kannon, and the seated image in a nearby nunnery of Miroku,
the buddha of the future (figs. 12-13). Both statues have features of the
Six Dynasties style — for example, the stiff, saw-toothed drapery of the
Kannon and the waterfall pattern in the lower folds of the Miroku ’s
clothing. Yet, there is also in both a suggestion of the voluptuousness and
earthly sensuality that were to appear later in the sculpture of the T’ang.
The Miroku, whose surface appears like metal after centuries of rubbing
with incense, has been particularly admired for its tender, dreamlike ex-
pression and for the gentle manner in which the hand is raised to the
face. It strikes a mudra characteristic of Miroku statues.

The art epoch from the Taika Reform of 645 until the founding of
the great capital city of Nara in 710 is usually called the Hakuho period
after one of the calendrical designations of the age. It was a time of vig-
orous reforming effort in Japan, directed by the imperial family itself;
and some of the more powerful sovereigns in Japanese history ruled dur-
ing the Hakuho period. Of these, it was the emperor Temmu (reigned
673-86) who first advanced Buddhism as the great protector of the coun-
try and of the imperial family. Buddhism had previously been patronized
by individuals, such as Prince Shotoku and certain chieftains of the Soga
family. Under Temmu and his successors, Buddhism received the official
patronage of the court, which sponsored the construction of a series of
great temples during the late seventh and eighth centuries.

In both sculpture and painting, the Hakuho period marked the tran-
sition in Japan, after a time lag of about a half-century, from the Bud-

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 12 Miroku buddha (Asuka-en)

dhist art style of China's Six Dynasties era to that of the T’ang. A
bronze trinity (now situated in the Yakushiji Temple in Nara) of Yaku-
shi, the healing buddha, and two attendant bodhisattvas exemplifies
the great T’ang style of sculpture as it was produced in Japan (fig.
14). The main elements of this style can perhaps best be seen in the
figures of the bodhisattvas: for example, in their sensuously curved and
fleshy bodies, their raised hairstyling, and their more naturally hanging
draperies.

The finest examples of painting from the Hakuho period are the
frescoes that adorn the interior of the golden hall at the Horyuji. Al-
though a fire in 1949 badly damaged these frescoes, photographs show
how they formerly appeared. An attendant bodhisattva in one of the
trinities depicted was especially well preserved and has been widely ad-
mired as one of the best examples of T’ang painting (fig. 1 5). Quite sim-

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 13 Kudara Kannon at the Horyuji Temple (Asuka-en)

ilar in appearance to the bodhisattvas in the Yakushi trinity of bronze
statues, it shows the great skill in linear technique of the artist of this
age. Its even lines have been called wirelike in contrast to the alternately
thick and thin lines, derived from the brushwork of calligraphy, that
were later so favored by painters in China and Japan.

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 14 From the Yakushi trinity at the Yakushiji Temple
(Asuka-en)

The site for Nara was chosen by Chinese geomancy, the art of select-
ing suitable terrain on the basis of the favorable arrangement of its sur-
rounding hills and the auspicious character of its “wind and water.”
Modeled after the T’ang capital of Ch’ang-an, although on a smaller
scale, Nara was laid out in orderly fashion with the palace enclosure in
the north-center, a grand boulevard running down its middle to the city’s
main gate of entrance in the south, and evenly intersecting north-south
and east-west avenues. Unlike the Chinese, the Japanese never con-
structed walled cities; and although the population of Nara probably
reached two hundred thousand in the eighth century, making it Japan’s
first truly urban center, contemporary accounts describe it as a city of
open spaces with many fields interspersed among the buildings.

The orderliness of the original plan for Nara paralleled the balanced
arrangement of the governmental offices and boards elaborated in the
Taiho Code, and reflected the fundamental Chinese taste for symmetry
in such matters. Some have speculated that the Japanese, on the other
hand, inherently prefer asymmetry. In any case, just as they ultimately

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 1*3 Attendant bodhisattva: detail of fresco in the
Golden Hall of the Horyuji Temple (Asuka-en)

deviated from China’s form of a balanced bureaucracy, the Japanese also
failed to develop Nara as planned. The present city lies almost entirely in
the northeastern suburbs of the eighth-century plan, and only recently
placed markers enable us to see where the palace enclosure and other
important sites of the original Nara were located. Kyoto, which became
the seat of the court in 794 after its move from Nara, was also laid out
symmetrically like Ch’ang-an; and it too spread erratically, primarily into
the northeastern suburbs. But, whereas Kyoto was often devastated by
warfare and other disasters during the medieval period and has few
buildings within its city limits that predate the sixteenth century, Nara
has retained substantially intact a number of splendid edifices and their
contents dating from the eighth century.

Even today, the visitor to Nara can recapture much of the splendor of
the brilliant youth of Japanese civilization. Nevertheless, it is difficult, in
view of the later introversion of Japanese society, to envision how extra-
ordinarily cosmopolitan Nara must have been in the eighth century. The
Japanese of the Nara period were the eager pupils of Chinese civiliza-

The Introduction of Buddhism

tion, and T’ang China was then the greatest empire in the world. The
Buddhist art of China, which the Japanese fervently emulated, was an
amalgam of many influences, not only from India but also from regions
as remote as Persia, Greece, and the Byzantine empire, all of which were
in contact with China by means of the overland caravan route known as
the Silk Road. Objets d’art, many still preserved in Nara, were imported
from these exotic places; and the Japanese court of the eighth century
welcomed visitors from India and other parts of Asia outside China,
visitors of a variety that would not appear in Japan again until modern
times.

One unusual aspect of Nara civilization was the degree of depen-
dence of the Japanese on the Chinese written language. There is no
archaeological or other evidence to indicate that the Japanese ever inde-
pendently attempted to devise a script of their own. The apparent
reason is simply that, in remote times, they became aware of the sophis-
ticated writing system of China and, as they advanced in the ways of
civilization, were content to use Chinese for purposes other than speech,
much as Latin was employed in Europe during the Middle Ages.

This could not, however, be a permanently satisfactory arrangement,
since structurally the Chinese and Japanese languages are vastly different.
Chinese is monosyllabic, terse, and has no grammatical inflections. Tense
and mood are either ignored or expressed by means of syntax and word
position within a sentence. Japanese, on the other hand, is polysyllabic,
diffuse and, like the Indo-European tongues, highly inflected.

After some fumbling starts in the Nara period, the Japanese in the
ninth century finally evolved a syllabary of approximately fifty symbols
(derived from Chinese characters) called kana . Although they could
thenceforth theoretically write their language exclusively in kana , they
had by this time also imported a great number of Chinese words into their
vocabulary, words that were most appropriately written with Chinese
characters (even though they were pronounced differently in Japanese).

Ultimately, the Japanese came to write in a mixture of Chinese char-
acters and kana. In the modern language, the characters are used mainly
for substantives, adjectives, and verbal stems, and the kana symbols are
employed as grammatical markers and for the writing (among other
things) of adverbs and foreign names. There is little question that Japa-
nese is the most complex written language in the world today, and the
modern man who holds utility to be the ultimate value must sorely lament
that the Japanese ever became burdened with the Chinese writing
system. Yet, from the aesthetic standpoint, the Chinese characters have
been infinitely enriching, and through the centuries have provided an
intimate cultural bond between the Chinese and Japanese (as well as the
Koreans, who have also utilized Chinese characters) that is one of the
most significant features of East Asian civilization.

The Introduction of Buddhism

The oldest extant books of the Japanese, as we have seen, are two
works of myth and history entitled Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, completed in
712 and 720, respectively. Prince Shotoku supposedly wrote texts a cen-
tury earlier on both Buddhism and history, but these were destroyed in
the burning of the Soga family’s library at the time of the 645 Taika
coup.

It is fitting that Japan’s earliest remaining works, composed at a time
when the country was so strongly under the civilizing influence of China,
should be of a historical character. In the Confucian tradition, the writ-
ing of history has always been held in the highest esteem, since Confu-
cianists believe that the lessons of the past provide the best guide for
ethical rule in the present and future. In contrast to the Indians, who
have always been absorbed with metaphysical and religious speculation
and scarcely at all with history, the Chinese are among the world’s great-
est record-keepers. They revere the written word, no doubt even more
so because of the evocative nature of their ideographic script, and they
transmitted this reverence for writing to the Japanese at an early date.

The Kojiki consists of an account of Japan from its creation to ap-
proximately the year a.d. 500, plus additional genealogical data about
the imperial family for the next century and a quarter. Unreliable as his-
tory, it is written in a complex style that employs Chinese characters both
in the conventional manner and to represent phonetically the sounds of
the Japanese language of the eighth century Because of its difficulty, the
Kojiki received scant attention for more than a thousand years; not until
the great eighteenth-century scholar Motoori Norinaga devoted more
than three decades to its decipherment did its contents become widely
known even among the Japanese.

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki (whose first part covers much the same
ground) are, as noted, the principal repositories of Japan’s extraordinarily
rich mythology, a mythology derived from a variety of materials including
ancient songs and legends, word etymologies, professed genealogies, and
religious rites. Although the two works contain numerous variant tales,
they give essentially the same account of the course of Japan up to the eve
of recorded history in the sixth century. Japanese scholars of the twen-
tieth century have proved conclusively that this central narrative of myths,
which tells of the descent of the imperial family from the omnipotent
Sun Goddess and its assumption of eternal rule on earth, was entirely
contrived sometime during the reform period of the late sixth and seventh
centuries to justify the claim to sovereignty of the reigning imperial
dynasty. Moreover, both books, but particularly the Kojiki , have been
shaped to give antiquity and luster to the genealogies of the leading
courtier families of the same period.

In contrast to the Kojiki , the Nihon Shoki is written in Chinese and
has been read and studied throughout the ages. It is also a much longer

The Introduction of Buddhism

work and contains, in addition to the mythology, a generally reliable
history of the sixth and seventh centuries. Indeed, as virtually the only
written source for affairs in Japan during this age, it became the first of
six “national histories” that cover events up to 887.

Nara civilization reached its apogee in the Tempyo epoch of Emperor
Shomu (reigned 724-49). Shomu is remembered as perhaps the most
devoutly Buddhist emperor in Japanese history, and certainly Buddhism
enjoyed unprecedented favor during his reign. Yet, this favor seems to
have been based more on adoration than understanding. The so-called
six sects of Nara Buddhism were highly complex metaphysical systems
imported from China that, doctrinally, provided little more than intel-
lectual exercise for a handful of priestly devotees in Japan. Some were
never established as independent sects, and none acquired a significant
following among the Japanese people.

Judged by the great rage at Nara for the copying of sutras to obtain
health and prosperity, Buddhism still held its appeal as potent magic.
The particular favor enjoyed by the healing buddha, Yakushi, suggests
that the primitive faith-healing instincts of the Japanese were widely
aroused by this popular Mahayanist deity.

But by far the most significant role of Buddhism in the Tempyo epoch
was as the great protector of the state. Shomu, who founded a national
Buddhist center at the Todaiji Temple in Nara and caused branch
temples and nunneries to be constructed in the provinces, carried to its
climax the policy of state sponsorship of Buddhism inaugurated by
Temmu half a century earlier. Ironically, Shomu’s great undertaking so
taxed the public resources of the Nara court that, far from strengthening
central rule as he wished, it was probably the single most important
factor in stimulating a decline in national administration over the next
century and a half.

Whatever the long-range effects of its construction on the course of
political events, the Todaiji became one of the greatest Buddhist estab-
lishments in Japan and the focal point for the brilliant age of Tempyo art
(fig. 16). Compared to the Horyuji, the Todaiji was laid out on a mam-
moth scale. It was spread over an extensive tract of land and its central
image, housed in the largest wooden structure in the world, was a bronze
statue fifty-three feet tall of the cosmic buddha Vairochana (called in
Japanese daibutsu or “great buddha”) that required eight attempts before
it was successfully cast (fig. 17). At the daibutsu' s “eye-opening” ceremony
in 752, when a cleric from India painted in the pupils of its eyes to give
it symbolic life, there were some ten thousand Buddhist priests in atten-
dance and many visitors from distant lands. It was by all accounts one of
the grandest occasions in early Japanese history.

Shortly before the eye-opening ceremony, Shomu, who in 749 had
abdicated the throne in favor of his daughter, appeared before the dai-
butsu and humbly declared himself a servant to the three Buddhist trea-

Fig. 17 Daibutsu at the Todaiji Temple (Consulate General
of Japan y New York)

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 18 Guardian deity in dry lacquer at the Todaiji
Temple (Charles E. Tuttle Publishing Co.)

sures (the buddha, the law, and the priesthood). This act was the high
point in the Nara court's public infatuation with Buddhism. Although
many later sovereigns were personally devout Buddhists, none after
Shomu ever made this sort of official gesture of submission to Buddhism
or to any religion other than Shinto.

Among the many excellent examples of Tempyo art at the Todaiji are
statues in two new mediums, clay and dry lacquer. In the unusual tech-
nique of dry lacquer sculpture, the artist began with either a clay base or
a wooden frame and built up a shell consisting of alternate layers of fabric
— mainly hemp — and lacquer. The very nature of the material made a
certain stiffness in the trunks and limbs of the finished figures inevitable.
Nevertheless, as can clearly be seen in one of the fierce guardian deities
at the Todaiji, the sculptors in dry lacquer were able to achieve much of
the realistic detailing that was so characteristic of the T'ang-inspired art
of the Tempyo period (fig. 18).

The most famous work in dry lacquer is the image at the Toshodaiji
in Nara of the blind Chinese priest Ganjin (688-763), who after several
unsuccessful attempts made the perilous crossing to Japan in 754 to
found one of the six Nara sects (fig. 19). This is the oldest surviving
portrait of an actual person in Japanese history. There is a painting from
the late seventh century of Prince Shotoku and two of his sons, but it

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 19 Statue of Ganjin at the Toshodaiji Temple (Asuka-en)

was done many years after the prince’s death and was drawn in such a
stylized Chinese fashion that the artist obviously made no attempt to por-
tray the features of real individuals. The Ganjin statue, on the other hand,
is extraordinarily lifelike and shows the priest in an attitude of intense
concentration. It was this kind of emotionally moving realism that so
greatly impressed Japanese sculptors of later centuries when they looked
back for inspiration to the classical art of the Tempyo period.

Near the Todaiji and originally part of the temple complex is a
remarkable building called the Shosbin (fig. 20). It has the appearance
of a gigantic, elongated log cabin with its floor raised some nine feet off
the ground on massive wooden pillars. Actually, the Shosoin consists of
three separate units that are joined together, each with its own entrance-
way, and it is a storehouse of world art from the eighth century. It has
stood intact for more than eleven centuries and before modern times
was opened only infrequently, sometimes remaining sealed for periods of

The Introduction of Buddhism

Fig. 20 Shosoin (Asuka-en)

up to a century or more. Because of its special construction — in addition
to a raised floor, it has sides made of logs that expand and contract to
maintain the temperature and humidity inside at a more even level—the
Shosoin has preserved its contents in nearly perfect condition.

Of the ten thousand or so items contained in the Shosoin, more than
six hundred were the personal belongings of Emperor Shomu; they in-
clude books, clothing, swords and other weapons, Buddhist rosaries,
musical instruments, mirrors, screens, and gaming boards. There are also
the ritual objects used in the eye-opening ceremony for the daibutsu , as
well as many maps, administrative documents, medicines, and masks of
wood and dry lacquer used in gigaku , a form of dance learned from China
that was popular at Buddhist temples during the Nara period.

The imported objects come from virtually every part of the known
world of Asia and Europe — including China, Southeast and Central Asia,
India, Arabia, Persia, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, and Rome — and include a
vast variety of fabrics, household belongings, blown and cut glass,
ceramicware, paintings, and statuary.

The outpouring of visual art in the Tempyo period was accompanied
by the first great blossoming of Japanese poetry. Although there are a
number of simple and artless songs in both the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki
and although efforts to poetize are very ancient in Japan, the compila-
tion about mid-eighth century of the Man’yoshu (Collection of a Myriad
Leaves) marked the true beginning of the Japanese poetic tradition. A

The Introduction of Buddhism

lengthy collection of some 4,500 poems, the Man'yoshu is not only
Japan’s first anthology but in the minds of many the finest, astonishing
as this may seem for so early a work. Some of the Man ’ydshu poems are
spuriously attributed to emperors and other lofty individuals of the
fourth and fifth centuries, an age shrouded in myth, and a great many
more are anonymous. Its poems appear in fact to constitute a sampling
of composition from about the middle of the seventh century to the
middle of the eighth, although we cannot know how representative this
sampling is of all the poems that must have been written in Japan during
that period.

Several features of the Man’ydshu set it apart from later anthologies.
First, it possesses a kind of native freshness and youthful vigor in its verses
that was lost in later centuries after Japanese culture had been more fully
transformed by the influence of continental civilization. Second, its
poems appear to have been written by people from many classes of
society, including peasants, frontier guards, and even beggars, as well as
the aristocrats who through much of the premodern era completely
monopolized poetic composition. Some modern scholars believe that
those Man 'ydshu poems whose authors appear to have been non-aristo-
cratic were, in reality, composed by courtiers who “went primitive.”
Nevertheless, the poems were at least written from the standpoint of the
non-aristocrat, a fact that distinguishes them from virtually all the other
poetry composed in Japan for many centuries to come.

A third feature of the Man’ydshu is the variety (by Japanese stan-
dards) of its poetic forms. Included in it are a number of so-called long
poems (choka) that possess a considerable grandeur and sweep. Yet,
even at this time the Japanese showed a marked preference for shorter
verse, and the great majority of poems in the Man'ydshu are in the zvaka4
form of thirty-one syllables — consisting of five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7
syllables — that was employed almost exclusively by poets for the next
five hundred years or more. Even when poets once again turned to other
forms, they usually selected those that were variants of the zvaka. For
example, the linked verse that became popular from about the four-
teenth century on was composed by three or more poets who divided
the zvaka into two “links” (one made up of the first three lines of 5, 7,
and 5 syllables and the other of the last two lines of 7 and 7 syllables),
which could be joined together endlessly. And the famous seventeen-
syllable haiku that came into fashion in the seventeenth century consisted
simply of the first link of the zvaka .

No complete explanation can be given of the Japanese predilection
for brief poetry, but it is certainly due in large part to the nature of the
Japanese language. Japanese has very few vowel sounds and is constructed
almost solely of independent vowels (a, i , u , e , o) and short, “open”
syllables that consist of a consonant and a vowel (for example, ka , su , mo).

The Introduction of Buddhism

The language therefore lacks the variety of sound necessary for true
poetic rhyme: indeed, it rhymes too readily. Moreover, it has little stress,
another element often used in prosody. Without recourse to rhyme or
stress, Japanese poets have generally found it difficult to write lengthy
pieces. The longer the poem, the greater the risk that it will become
indistinguishable from prose. Instead, poets have since earliest times
preferred shorter poetic forms, usually written in combinations of five-
and seven-syllable lines. No one has been able to say with certainty why
the five- and seven-syllable line units have been so preferred, although
one interesting conjecture is that they are another reflection of the Japa-
nese taste for the asymmetrical.

Precluded by the scope of the zvaka from writing extended narratives
or developing complex ideas, poets have concentrated on imagery to
elicit direct emotional responses from their audiences. They have also
fully exploited the exceptional capacity of the Japanese language for
subtle shadings and nuance, and have used certain devices such as the
“pivot word” (kakekotoba) to enrich the texture of their lines and make
possible the expression of double and even triple meanings. Use of the
pivot word can be illustrated by the line Senkata naku, “There is nothing
to be done.” Naku renders the phrase negative, but at the same time it
has the independent meaning of “to cry.” Thus, an expression of despair
may simultaneously convey the idea of weeping.

During the Heian period (794-1185), when poetry became the
exclusive property of the courtier class, strict rules were evolved that
severely limited the range of poetic topics and the moods under which
poets could compose. Poetry was intended to be moving but not over-
powering.

By contrast, the Man ydshu contains poems dealing with many of the
subjects that later poets came to regard as unfitting or excessively harsh
for their elegant poeticizing, such as inconsolable grief upon the death
of a loved one, poverty, and stark human suffering. A “long poem” from
the anthology expresses one poet’s feelings after the loss of his wife:

Since in Karu lived my wife,

I wished to be with her to my heart's content;

But I could not visit her constantly
Because of the many watching eyes —

Men would know of our troth,

Had I sought her too often.

So our love remained secret like a rock-pent pool;

I cherished her in my heart,

Looking to aftertime when we should be together,

And lived secure in my trust
As one riding a great ship.

Suddenly there came a messenger

The Introduction of Buddhism

Who told me she was dead—

Was gone like a yellow leaf of autumn.

Dead as the day dies with the setting sun,

Lost as the bright moon is lost behind the cloud,

Alas, she is no more, whose soul
Was bent to mine like bending seaweed!

When the word was brought to me
I knew not what to do nor what to say;

But restless at the mere news.

And hoping to heal my grief
Even a thousandth part,

I journeyed to Karu and searched the market place
Where my wife was wont to go!

There I stood and listened
But no voice of her I heard,

Though the birds sang in the Unebi Mountains;

None passed by who even looked like my wife.

I could only call her name and wave my sleeve.15

One of the most famous of the Man’ydshu poems is the “Dialogue on
Poverty,” which begins with these lines:

On the night when the rain beats,

Driven by the wind,

On the night when the snowflakes mingle
With the sleety rain,

I feel so helplessly cold.

I nibble at a lump of salt,

Sip the hot, oft-diluted dregs of sake;

And coughing, snuffling,

And stroking my scanty beard,

I say in my pride,

“There’s none worthy, save I!”

But I shiver still with cold.

I pull up my hempen bedclothes.

Wear what few sleeveless clothes I have,

But cold and bitter is the night!

As for those poorer than myself,

Their parents must be cold and hungry,

Their wives and children beg and cry.

Then, how do you struggle through life?6

The poem cited above on the death of a wife is by Kakinomoto no
Hitomaro (dates unknown), the finest poet represented in the Man’yoshu
and perhaps the greatest in all Japanese literature. Few details remain
about Hitomaro ’s life, although it is known that he was of low courtier
rank, held some provincial posts, and served as court poet during the
late seventh and eighth centuries. The function of court poet in Hito-

The Introduction of Buddhism

maro’s time entailed the composition of commemorative poems or en-
comiums on occasions such as courtly journeys or imperial hunts and of
eulogies upon the deaths of members of the imperial family. This use of
poetry for the expression of lofty sentiment in response to prominent
public events or ceremonies was no doubt influenced by the Chinese
practice, but it was not perpetuated in Japan much beyond Hitomaro’s
time. Japanese poets have always been powerfully drawn to personal lyri-
cism rather than the pronouncement of what may be regarded as more
socially elevated, if not precisely moralistic, feelings. The early Japanese
language was particularly suited to lyrical expression, and the extent to
which Japanese poets went to retain that quality can be seen in how care-
fully they protected their native poetic vocabulary, consisting mostly of
concrete, descriptive terms, from the intrusion of more abstract and
complex Chinese loan words. Kakinomoto no Hitomaro was fully cap-
able of writing lyrical poetry, as his deeply felt lament on the death of his
wife reveals; but he also composed sustained verse, particularly in the
“long poem” form, on topics of public and stately relevance that were
not regarded as the proper concern of later poets.

Since it was the zvaka that was to reign supreme in later court poetry,
let us examine one of these poems from the M an [ ydshu :

I will think of you, love,

On evenings when the gray mist
Rises above the rushes
And chill sounds the voice
Of the wild ducks crying.7

In this poem, which is attributed to a frontier guard, we find a blending
of the two main subjects of zvaka, romantic love and nature. We will ob-
serve in the next chapter the important qualities of romantic love as they
evolved in the courtier tradition. Let us note here some aspects of the
Japanese attitude toward nature.

The Japanese seek beauty in nature not in what is enduring or perma-
nent, but in the fragile, the fleeting, and the perishable. Above all, their
feelings about nature have from earliest times been absorbed by the
changes brought by the seasons. Of the four seasons, spring and autumn
are preferred, the former as a time of celebration of the beginning or
renewal of life and the latter as a moment signaling the ultimate perish-
ing of all life and beauty. But, whatever the season, it has been the ele-
ment of change that has mattered most. A courtier of the fourteenth cen-
tury expressed this sentiment when he wrote that it is precisely because
life and nature are changeable and uncertain that things have the power
to move us.8

Although the Japanese taste for spring and autumn may at first have
been nearly equal, autumn, the season when things perish, possessed an

The Introduction of Buddhism

inherently greater allure; and with the passing years — and especially the
arrival in the late twelfth century of the medieval age of fighting and dis-
order— autumn (and its portent of winter) assumed supremacy. Then,
as we shall see, poets and others sought to press their senses “beyond
beauty,” and to find aesthetic value in the realm of the lonely, the cold,
and the withered.

Underlying the Japanese preference for perishable beauty is an acute
sensitivity to the passage of time. Indeed, the “tyranny of time” has been
a pervasive theme in literature and the other arts. It is a tribute to the
aesthetic and artistic genius of the Japanese that they were ultimately
able, as just suggested, to use this theme to extend their tastes beyond
the range of conventional beauties to things, such as the withered and
worn, that have literally been ravaged by time.

In addition to composing poetry in their own language, the early
Japanese also wrote verse in Chinese. The difficulties of writing in a for-
eign tongue are obviously enormous; yet, Chinese culture was held in
the highest esteem by the Japanese, and for a time, especially during the
early ninth century, it appeared that the courtiers might cease entirely
their literary efforts in the Japanese language and devote themselves
exclusively to composition in Chinese. Fortunately for the evolution of a
native culture, this did not happen. But Chinese nevertheless continued
to hold much attraction for the Japanese, both as a classical language
and, in poetry, as a means to express those ideas of a complex or ab-
stract nature for which the waka was totally inadequate. The earliest
anthology of Chinese poetry by Japanese, the Kaifuso (Fond Recollections
of Poetry), was compiled in the mid-Nara period, about the same time as
the Man’ydshu . An example taken from this anthology is the following
piece, “Composed at a Party for the Korean Envoy”:

Mountain windows scan the deep valley;

Groves of pine line the evening streams.

We have asked to our feast the distant envoy;

At this table of parting we try the pleasures of poetry.

The crickets are hushed, the cold night wind blows;

Geese fly beneath the clear autumn moon.

We offer this flower-spiced wine in hopes

To beguile the cares of your long return.9

The Court at Its Zenith

In 794 the court moved to the newly constructed city of Heian or
Kyoto, about twenty-eight miles north of Nara. The decision to leave
Nara was apparently made for several reasons. Many people at court had
become alarmed over the degree of official favor accorded to Buddhism
and the manifold opportunities presented to Buddhist priests to interfere
in the business of state. Their fears were particularly aroused when an
empress (Shomu’s daughter) became closely involved with a faith-healing
priest named Dokyo (d. 772). Before the loss of his patroness, who died
in 770, Dokyo rose to the highest ecclesiastical and ministerial positions
in the land and even sought, through the pronouncement of an oracle, to
ascend the throne itself. Dokyo thus achieved notoriety in Japanese his-
tory as a commoner who blatantly challenged the imperial family’s sacro-
sanct claim to reign exclusively over Japan. The Dokyo affair appears to
have convinced the court of two things: that Nara, with its many Buddhist
establishments and its ubiquitous priesthood, was no longer satisfactory
for the conduct of secular affairs; and that henceforth the line of succes-
sion to the throne should be confined solely to male members of the
imperial family.

Another reason for the move to Kyoto was that Nara, situated in the
mountainous southern region of the central provinces, had become too
cramped as a location for the court. Kyoto provided much freer access,
both by land and water, to the rest of the country. In particular, the court
could more readily undertake from Kyoto the expansion and consolida-
tion of its control over the eastern and northern provinces, a region that
had until this time been occupied chiefly by recalcitrant tribesmen known
as Emishi.

The Emishi, referred to in early accounts as “hairy people,” have
often been identified with the Ainu, a race of Caucasian-like people who
live in Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s major islands, and number
today only a few thousand. It was long believed that the Ainu occupied
all of Japan during the Neolithic Jomon age — that they were the “Jomon
people” — and, driven steadily eastward and northward by the advance of
civilization in Yayoi times, suffered a fate similar to that of the American

The Court at Its Zenith

Indians. Since the Ainu, like Caucasians, have considerably more body
hair than the Japanese, it appeared obvious that they were the very
“hairy Emishi” mentioned in the pages of the Nihon Shoki and other his-
torical accounts. Yet, there are several reasons to doubt this linking of
Ainu and Emishi. For one thing, the expression “hairy people” was
loosely and pejoratively applied in both China and Japan to uncivilized
people in general — people who were regarded as unkempt, dirty, and
uncouth — and did not necessarily imply that such people were racially
endowed with a greater quantity of hair. Also, mummified bodies of Japa-
nese warrior chieftains of later centuries in the north, who reportedly
had Emishi mothers, have been examined and found to possess none of
the bodily characteristics of the Ainu.

There is, then, a strong possibility that the Ainu, whose precise origins
remain a mystery, never settled extensively south of Hokkaido; and that
the Emishi were in fact ethnically the same as the Japanese, but were not
incorporated into the Yamato state when it was established in the central
and western provinces during the fourth through the sixth centuries. In
any event, after several failures, armies dispatched by the Heian court
finally inflicted decisive defeat on the Emishi in the early years of the
ninth century and thus eliminated the threat posed by these ferocious
tribesmen on the eastern frontier.

After the move to Kyoto, the court attempted to encourage the activ-
ities of Buddhist prelates who would devote their attention to spiritual
rather than worldly matters. Among the first to receive court patronage
was Saicho (767-822), who journeyed to China in 804 and returned to
found the Tendai sect of Buddhism at the Enryakuji, a temple he had
earlier opened on Mount Hiei northeast of Kyoto. The Enryakuji was in
a particularly favorable spot, since it was believed that evil spirits in-
vaded from the northeast and it could serve as guardian of the capital.

Tendai was broadly founded on the teachings of the Mahayana or
Greater Vehicle school of Buddhism. Its basic scripture, the Lotus Sutra ,
purportedly contained Gautama’s last sermon, in which he revealed to his
disciples the universality of the buddha potential. The Buddha asserted
that until this time he had allowed individuals to practice Hinayana, the
Lesser Vehicle, and to seek their own enlightenments. Now mankind was
prepared for the final truth that everyone could attain buddhahood. In
the Buddha’s words as found in the sutra:

Those harassed by all the sufferings —

To them I at first preached Nirvana
Attainable by one’s own efforts.

Such were the expedient means I employed
To lead them to Buddha-wisdom.

Not then could I say to them,

“You all shall attain to Buddhahood.”

The Court at Its Zenith

For the time had not yet arrived.

But now the very time has come
And I must preach the Great Vehicle.1

We noted that the universalistic concept of Mahayana was accompanied
both by a tendency to regard the Buddha as a transcendent, rather than
earthly, being and by adulation for the bodhisattva, or buddha-to-be,
who would assist others on the path to buddhahood.

The Lotus Sutra is not only the basic text of Tendai, but the principal
writing of all of Mahayana Buddhism. Drawing within its pages the
entire range of Buddhist thought, both Hinayana and Mahayana, the
Lotus is held to be the “one vehicle,” the sole and ultimate source of reli-
gious truth. Its influence has been especially great in the countries of
East Asia, where it has been revered not only as a text for religious study,
but also an object of devotion in and of itself. Thus, according to some
Buddhist sects, one need not try to understand the Lotus' s contents but
simply to worship it. And believers have through the ages sought religious
merit by copying the Lotus, a task requiring considerable effort because
of the sutra’s great length.

The Tendai center at the Enryakuji played an extremely prominent
role in premodern Japanese history. It became a vast complex of more
than three thousand buildings, where priests engaged in a wide range of
both spiritual and secular studies. In the best Far Eastern tradition, the
Tendai priests sought to synthesize all known religious truths and prac-
tices; and ultimately it was Tendai that, beginning in the late Heian
period, spawned the various popular sects that finally spread Buddhism
to the common people throughout Japan.

Another, and less edifying, way in which the Enryakuji attained dis-
tinction in premodern times was as a center for akuso or “rowdy monks.”
During the Nara period, the court had strictly limited the entry of people
other than members of the aristocracy into the Buddhist priesthood. But
after the move of the capital to Kyoto, entry restrictions were relaxed and
the more important Buddhist temples, which were already in the process
of acquiring great wealth in landed estates, hired increasing numbers of
peasants to serve in their private armies. By the tenth and eleventh cen-
turies, these hordes of akuso had become regularly engaged not only in
fighting among themselves but also in intimidating Kyoto into meeting
their demands for such things as ecclesiastical positions at court and titles
to desirable pieces of estate land.

The manner in which the Enryakuji monks commonly made their
demands upon the court reveals something of the ties that had evolved
by this time between Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Obtaining the
sacred k ami emblems of the Hie Shrine located at the foot of Mount Hiei,
the monks placed them in a portable car and transported the car to the
capital, where they deposited it at a busy intersection near the palace.

The Court at Its Zenith

Since no one dared touch the car, activities simply ceased in that part of
the city until the monks, their demands met, condescended to remove it
and carry it back to the mountain.

Although the Tendai sect’s Enryakuji Temple became a great national
center for Buddhist studies in Japan, the particular kind of Buddhism
that exerted the strongest influence at court during the early Heian period
was Tantrism. Tantrism was a branch of Mahayana Buddhism established
independently in India about a.d. 600 and subsequently transmitted to
China and Japan. Because of its stress on incantations, spells, and primi-
tive magic, Tantrism has been viewed by many outsiders as a corrupt and
decadent phase of Buddhism after the period of its greatest historical
flourishing. Insofar as one part of Tantrism became associated with
Indian Shakti practices dealing with death, destruction, and living sacri-
fices, there may be justification for this view. But the form of Tantrism
that spread to the Far East did not embrace such grotesque practices.
Known also as esoteric Buddhism because of its insistence on the secret
transmission of its teachings, Tantrism came to hold a unique appeal for
the aristocracy of the Heian court and provided a powerful stimulus to
the arts in Japan during the ninth and tenth centuries.

Tantrism was introduced to Japan as the Shingon (True Word) sect
by the priest Kukai (774-835; also familiarly known by his posthumous
canonical name of Kobo Daishi, or Great Teacher Kobo), who traveled
to China in 804 on the same mission as Saicho. Kukai, who founded a
Shingon center atop Mount Koya near modern Osaka, was without ques-
tion one of the most outstanding figures in Japanese history. The distin-
guished British scholar of Japan, Sir George Sansom, has said of him:

His memory lives all over the country, his name is a household word in the

remotest places, not only as a saint, but as a preacher, a scholar, a painter, an

inventor, an explorer and — sure passport to fame — a great calligrapher.2

Among other things, Kukai is credited with inventing the kana sylla-
bary.3 Most likely kana was more the product of evolution than invention.
But it is also believed that knowledge of Sanskrit provided at least some
of the inspiration that led to kana , and Kukai is known to have become
an avid student of Sanskrit during his three-year stay in China.

Kukai’s scholarly accomplishments were imposing. In a tract entitled
The Ten Stages of Religious Consciousness, he made perhaps the most
famous attempt in Japanese history to synthesize and evaluate various
religious beliefs according to their higher or lower “stages of conscious-
ness.” At the bottom, Kukai placed the animal passions, where no reli-
gious consciousness at all existed; he then proceeded upward by stages
through Confucianism, Taoism, various Hinayana and quasi-Mahayana
sects, fully developed Mahayana and, finally, to the ultimate religious
consciousness of Shingon itself.

Shingon is centered on belief in the cosmic buddha Vairochana (in

The Court at Its Zenith

Japanese, Dainichi) . All things — including the historical Buddha, Gau-
tama, and such transcendent beings as Yakushi (the healing buddha)
and Amida (the buddha of the boundless light) — are merely manifesta-
tions of this universal entity. In order to enter into communion with
Dainichi and realize the essential oneness of all existence, the supplicant
must utilize the Three Mysteries of speech, body, and mind. Proper ritual
performance requires the coordinated practice of all three mysteries; but
perhaps the most important is that of speech, which calls for the recita-
tion of spells or “true words” (mantras in Sanskrit; shingon in Japanese).
The use of words as spells has fascinated man throughout his existence,
and the mantras of esoteric Buddhism derive from an ancient tradition.
Probably the most famous mantra is the Tibetan phrase Om mani padme
hum (“The jewel is in the lotus!”), but there are a great many others also
employed in the religious supplications of esotericism.

The mysteries of the body are based primarily on the hand poses
known as mudras. We have seen the use of mudras for iconographic pur-
poses in sculpture and in pictorial representations of buddhas and bodhi-
sattvas. In Shingon ritual, on the other hand, mudras are struck by the
believer as he addresses himself to these superior beings.

A device used in Shingon as an aid to meditation is the mandala, or
cosmic diagram (fig. 21). Mandalas may simply be sketched on the
ground and expunged after the completion of a rite; or they may be per-
manently produced as carvings and paintings. In Japan the most common
type of mandala is the hanging scroll, although there are also a number
of mandalas carved in relief and painted on temple walls. These dia-
grams, which usually depict Dainichi surrounded by the myriad lesser
figures of the Shingon pantheon, are often superior works of art. And in-
deed in the Heian period the exceptional visual attraction of the man-
dalas and other Shingon icons greatly helped to endear esotericism to the
Kyoto courtiers, who were finely sensitive to beauty in all its forms.

It was by no means simply the visual delights of Shingon that made it
so popular at the Heian court. Despite efforts during the Taika or Great
Reform era to create a Confucian-type meritocracy under the throne,
Japan's ruling class had remained preponderantly aristocratic: that is,
birth almost invariably took precedence over ability or achievement. In
the Nara period there was some opportunity for men of modest back-
grounds to advance by entering the Buddhist priesthood or by specializ-
ing in Chinese studies; but in Heian times the court reverted to a rigid
hierarchical ordering of society determined solely by family origins. It is
not surprising, then, that the Heian courtiers found congenial a sect like
Shingon, which similarly asserted a fixed hierarchy among its pantheon
of deities headed by Dainichi. Interestingly, Dainichi is written with the
characters for “great sun”; and the Japanese were not slow to identify him
with the supreme Shinto deity, the Sun Goddess. Going a step further,

The Court at Its Zenith

< H V V.

"(!W<V

:< VV v|

ptmi

Sl? fir

r * . 7 ■ ,r ^

*|Tf( > M MM MM
k-»;0;. iv kQ< i

ifrt *, M 0-M .OH

1“o6i **. &

j »i

#0;q; w ;Q'°4*

* M M t * M M ( W , ■

* 4 ♦•_%,# + 4

* * *x

-EKffffRJEKI

^ ot*’

■o' f> 0ft 0f V0 < V

• * ' 4 4 '«_• Jl4_*

* t, * I « 4 4

^Q. 0;n

0 ( vG « ' '.) < >d

;0. * * * ®p: ip;R

m in m <a * & M @j§> g

Fig. 2 1 Mandala ( courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

they were able to liken the gods of Shingon collectively to the commu-
nity of kami from whom all the great courtier families claimed descent.

The exclusive, esoteric character of Shingon also appealed greatly to
the Heian courtiers. Although Shingon, like Mahayana Buddhism in gen-
eral, preached the universality of the buddha potential, in practice it con-
fronted its would-be followers with such complex and time-consuming
practices that only priests or leisured aristocrats could hope to master
them. And in any case Shingon gave the general populace little chance
even to attempt the practices by keeping them secret from all but a
favored few. The mysteries of Shingon were theoretically transmitted
solely by the teacher, or guru, to his direct disciples. Outsiders might

The Court at Its Zenith

derive some satisfaction from contemplating with awe the dark wonders
of Shingon, but as the uninitiated they would forever be denied the high-
est rewards it promised.

So strongly did the courtiers favor Shingon that, in order to meet the
competition, the Tendai sect also evolved a form of esotericism. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that esoteric Buddhism, particularly dur-
ing the ninth and tenth centuries, permeated every aspect of the lives of
the Heian aristocracy. Its aestheticism, exclusivity, and promise of real-
izing through arcane practices the buddha nature in this life were irre-
sistible to the courtiers. Yet, esoteric Buddhism, although it may have
been established on a high plane by Kukai and his immediate successors,
was particularly susceptible to corruption; and in the late Heian period,
it degenerated to the point where its clergy engaged in base practices,
accepting fees from the laity to secure direct benefits in health, fame,
and prosperity.

An important trend among the new sects of Heian Buddhism was their
move away from the busy centers of temporal life and political activity to
mountainous, remote regions. Kyoto eventually became as clustered with
temples as Nara, but at least the example was set for some temples to
locate where the temptations of worldly pleasures were minimal and
where monks could truly lead the disciplined and meditative religious life.

Buddhism had entered Japan as part of a great reforming process
aimed at centralization, and it was surely a sign of maturity that, after
some two centuries, an increasing number of both secular and religious
leaders saw the importance of drawing a distinction between the proper
spheres of activity of the court (as an administrative body) and the Bud-
dhist church. The Heian sects sought to sustain the idea of Buddhism as
the guardian of the nation, and rowdy monks engaged in ugly quarrels
over quite mundane issues; but still there was general recognition of the
need henceforth to keep church and state separate.

The founding of temples in mountainous regions also brought signif-
icant changes in Buddhist architecture. Only two buildings remain from
the early Heian period — the golden hall and pagoda of a Shingon temple,
the Muroji, situated in a dense forest of towering cryptomeria about forty
miles from Kyoto — but we can tell from these, as well as from various
reconstructions, what the new trends in architecture were. The orderly,
garan- type layouts were abandoned by the mountain temples in favor of
adapting the shapes and placement of their buildings to the special fea-
tures of rough, uneven terrain. This kind of architectural integration with
the natural environment seems to have been particularly to the liking
of the Japanese. It was reminiscent of earlier Shinto architecture and, at
the same time, revealed the Far Eastern impulse to merge with — rather
than seek to overcome — nature. A keen sensitivity to nature and a desire
to find human identity with it in all its manifestations are among the
strongest themes in the Japanese cultural tradition.

The Court at Its Zenith

Fig. 22 Shishinden of the imperial palace in Kyoto (photograph by
Joseph Shulman)

Other features of Shinto architecture incorporated into both temple
and secular buildings in the early Heian — or, to art historians, Jogan —
period were the elevation of floors above ground level and the thatching
of roofs with Cyprus bark instead of clay tiles. (See the end of Chapter 1
for other remarks about the influence of granary style architecture on
both shrine and palace buildings.) These features can plainly be seen in
the old imperial palace (Shishinden) in Kyoto (fig. 22). The buildings of
the palace compound were frequently destroyed by fire, and the present
structures, most of them erected in the nineteenth century, are not even
situated in the same part of the city as the original compound. Neverthe-
less, they are faithful reproductions and, in the absence of other buildings,
give us at least some idea of what the capital looked like in early Heian
times.

Buddhist sculpture of the Jogan period showed a marked change from
the realistic, often grandly imposing works of the Tempyo epoch. The
court had withdrawn its direct patronage of Buddhism and, although
many temples became privately affluent through the acquisition of landed
estates, there was no further urge to undertake such vast artistic projects
as the casting of the daibutsu, which had required the concerted effort of
many craftsmen. Jogan statues were generally much smaller than those of
Tempyo and were most likely carved by individual sculptors, who made
very little use of the materials favored during Tempyo — bronze, clay, and
dry lacquer — but preferred, instead, to work chiefly in wood. One reason
for the new preference for wood wras the interest aroused by the sandal-
wood statues imported from China about this time and in vogue at court.

The Court at Its Zenith

Many Jogan statues were carved out of single blocks of wood, a fact
that helps account for their general smallness. They were also left either
entirely unpainted or with only the lips and eyes tinted in order not to
seal off the natural fragrance of the wood.

An excellent example of J5gan sculpture in wood is the statue of the
healing buddha, Yakushi, at the Jingoji in Kyoto. The rigid stance and
stylized clothing of the buddha may appear to signify a reversion to an
earlier, less sophisticated method of sculpture. But in fact they reflect
the wish, in line with esoteric tastes, to produce figures that were un-
earthly and mysterious. The statue’s facial expression is grim and forbid-
ding, and its body is much heavier and more gross-looking than the typi-
cal Tempyo image. The “wave” pattern of its draperies is characteristic
of Jogan sculpture and can be seen even more sharply delineated in the
seated image of the historical buddha at the Muroji.

Apart from the mandalas, virtually the only paintings extant from the
Jogan epoch are representations of ferocious and hideous creatures such
as Fudo, “the immovable.” These creatures, some of which have multiple
heads and arms, were in reality the cosmic buddha, Dainichi, in altered
forms, and their job was to frighten and destroy the enemies of Bud-
dhism. Fudo is usually shown with a flaming body halo, a sword in one
hand and a rope in the other.

Esoteric iconography inspired some Jogan artists to attempt the first
plastic representations of the deities of Shinto. Several of these kami fig-
ures still remain, but there is little to indicate that any real impetus was
given at this time to evolve a new form of Shinto art.

The court of the early ninth century was outwardly perhaps even more
enamored of Chinese civilization than its predecessor at Nara a century
earlier. Chinese poetry was in particular the rage among Emperor Saga
(reigned 809-23) and his intimates, who held competitions in Chinese
versemanship, compiled anthologies in the manner of the Kaifusd , and
virtually ignored the zvaka. It was also during Saga’s reign that Kukai
was first received at court. A brilliant scholar, litterateur, and gifted writer
in Chinese, Kukai has been ranked along with Saga and Tachibana no
Hayanari (d. 842), who headed the mission that Saicho and Kukai
accompanied to the continent in 804, as one of the three “great brushes”
or calligraphers of the age. Kukai had visited Ch’ang-an, the wondrous
capital of T’ang, and had returned not only with many books and works
of art but also with knowledge of the latest Chinese fashions, including
the vogue for esoteric Buddhism. A contemporary observer might well
have judged, from the preferences of such luminaries at court as Saga and
Kukai, that Japan of the early ninth century had indeed become a minia-
ture model of China.

We can see in retrospect that the Japanese did not slavishly copy Chi-

The Court at Its Zenith

nese civilization; some important institutions never took root in Japanese
soil and others were considerably remolded to suit the native setting. In
addition to abandoning the fundamental Confucian principle of govern-
ment by merit, the Japanese also ultimately rejected the T’ang “equal-
field” system of land distribution. Within a few centuries, nearly all agri-
cultural land in the country had fallen into the hands of the aristocracy
and religious institutions as private estates. Along with a parallel deterio-
ration of the court’s provincial administration, this process created con-
ditions (as we shall see in the next chapter) that gave rise to a warrior
class in the provinces in mid- and late Heian times.

The most significant political development at court in the ninth cen-
tury was the rise of a single clan — the Fujiwara — which was descended
from one of the chief architects of the Great Reform and came to domi-
nate the imperial family through marriage even more completely and for
a much longer time than the Soga. Insinuating themselves ever closer to
the throne, the Fujiwara in 858 assumed the office of imperial regent4
(held previously only by members of royalty, such as Prince Shotoku)
and within a century became the undisputed wielders of absolute power
at court.

Fujiwara mastery over the imperial family was to a great extent made
possible by the peculiarities of Heian marriage customs. Usually, al-
though not invariably, courtiers of this age established formal residence
in the homes of their wives. From the contemporary literature it appears
that the typical courtier kept one or more secondary wives and mis-
tresses and frequently was lax in visiting his principal wife, perhaps not
calling upon her more than once or twice a month. Yet, the principal
wife’s home remained their joint residence and it was there that the chil-
dren were raised. Although emperors did not actually move in with their
Fujiwara wives, the offspring of such unions were reared in the man-
sions of the maternal relatives. Between the late ninth and late eleventh
centuries, emperors without exception were the sons of Fujiwara mothers,
and in view of their upbringing no doubt identified themselves as closely
with the Fujiwara as with the imperial family.

Even as the Fujiwara began their rise to power, the court reached the
decision to terminate official relations with China. One reason for this
decision, made sometime after the last mission of 8 38, 5 was that the
T’ang dynasty had fallen into decline and China was no longer a safe
place for travel; but perhaps more fundamental was the fact that the Japa-
nese did not feel the same need as before to look to China for guidance
and inspiration. The long period of cultural borrowing, begun some two
and a half centuries earlier, had at last come to an end.

The Japanese court of the late ninth century not only severed official
relations with China; it also gradually withdrew from all but the most
necessary dealings with the provinces of Japan itself. In contrast to its

The Court at Its Zenith

cosmopolitanism in the Nara period, the court in the tenth century be-
came isolated to an extraordinary degree from the rest of Japanese society.
Of the various causes for this isolation, one of the most decisive was the
court’s system of ministerial ranking by which infinitely greater luster and
prestige was bestowed upon officials in the capital than upon those in
the provinces. To accept and occupy a provincial post, the courtier was
obliged not only to forsake the comforts and cultural attractions of the
Heian capital, but also to suffer diminished status and even risk social
opprobrium. For want of opportunity in Kyoto, some courtiers had no
alternative; moreover, the possibility of acquiring new wealth in the
provinces was tempting. But for a member of the upper nobility, life away
from the capital was almost unthinkable. Even if given an important gov-
ernorship, he would be apt either to send a deputy in his place or simply
direct the vice-governor, usually a local magnate, to look after the admin-
istrative affairs of the province.

The epoch of the tenth century and most of the eleventh was one of
“power and glory” for the Fujiwara regents. It was also an age when the
Japanese brought to maturity their classical culture. Although it owed
much to its Chinese antecedents, this culture was nevertheless genuinely
unique and a true product of the native genius.

Of all the arts that flourished at court during the Fujiwara epoch, the
one that most embodied its creative spirit was literature and, in partic-
ular, poetry. The ninth-century craze for Chinese verse waned with the
trailing off of relations with the continent, and the courtiers turned their
attention once again to the waka. Before long, their passion for this
traditional form of poetic expression was revived to the point of near in-
satiability and they devoted themselves endlessly to composition both in
private and in the company of others at poetry contests, where teams of
the right and left were called upon to compose on given themes. The
ability to recognize a waka allusion and to extemporize at least passable
lines became absolutely essential, not only in the more formal tests of
poetic competence to which the courtier was put, but also in everyday
social intercourse. Probably no other society in history has placed so
great a premium on versification.

Inseparable from the revival of interest in the waka , and indeed the
development of Fujiwara literature in general, was the evolution of the
kana syllabary. Even at the height of enthusiasm for Chinese poetry at
the court of Emperor Saga earlier in the ninth century, this means for
writing in the vernacular was being perfected. Kukai himself, as we have
seen, was closely associated with the “invention” of kana .

During the time of Saga, three imperially authorized or official anthol-
ogies of Chinese poetry were compiled, and in 905 the first official an-
thology of waka , the Kokinshu (Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems)
was produced at court. Although the earlier, unofficial Man’yoshu had

The Court at Its Zenith

been a superb collection, it was the Kokinshu that truly set the standards
for classical Japanese poetry. The Man ’ydshu had been written by means
of a complex use of Chinese ideographs to represent Japanese phonetics,
and the Heian courtiers found it obscure and difficult to read. More-
over, the Man 'ydshu set forth the sentiments of a quite different age. In
the new world of the Kokinshu , refinement, taste, and decorum took
absolute precedence over candor and vigorous emotional expression. The
Heian poet, as we can observe in the following poems from the Kokinshu ,
was expected to versify at the proper time and in the proper mood:

This perfectly still

Spring day bathed in the soft light

From the spread-out sky,

Why do the cherry blossoms
So restlessly scatter down?

Although I am sure
That he will not be coming,

In the evening light
When the locusts shrilly call
I go to the door and wait.6

It was eminently proper to respond sensitively to the charm of a spring
day and to reflect wistfully upon the brevity of life as called to mind by
the scattering of the cherry blossoms; it was also most fitting for the poet
to express loneliness and yearning for a lover, so long as he did not carry
his feelings to the point of uncontrollable anger or anguish at being
neglected.

A leading poet of the day was Ki no Tsurayuki (868P-946), one of the
compilers of the Kokinshu . Tsurayuki also wrote the preface to this
anthology and thereby produced not only the first important piece of lit-
erary criticism in Japanese history but also an excellent statement of the
standards that guided the courtly taste in versification. In the opening
lines to the preface, Tsurayuki expressed the deep psychological, social,
and aesthetic significance that he, as a representative of the Heian courtier
class of the early tenth century, attached to poetry:

The poetry of Japan has its roots in the human heart and flourishes in the
countless leaves of words. Because human beings possess interests of so many
kinds, it is in poetry that they give expression to the meditations of their
hearts in terms of the sights appearing before their eyes and the sounds com-
ing to their ears. Hearing the warbler sing among the blossoms and the frog
in his fresh waters — is there any living being not given to song? It is poetry
which, without exertion, moves heaven and earth, stirs the feelings of gods
and spirits invisible to the eye, softens the relations between men and women,
calms the hearts of fierce warriors.7

The Court at Its Zenith

Tsurayuki speaks of poetry in terms of "words” and "heart.” The
words are the Yamato language — free from the tainting of Chinese — that
was established as the classical medium of expression for native poetry
by the Man ’yoshu, But the heart or feelings seen as the proper subject
matter for poetry by Tsurayuki and his fellow Kokinshu poets are quite
different from those of the Man 'ydshu, some of whose most memorable
verses deal with such harsh topics as death, poverty, and hunger. The
range of feelings in the age of the Kokinshu was greatly narrowed and
refined to a high degree. As Tsurayuki puts it, poets should be inspired
to verse

when they looked at the scattered blossoms of a spring morning; when they
listened of an autumn evening to the falling of the leaves; when they sighed
over the snow and waves reflected each passing year by their looking glasses;
when they were startled into thoughts on the brevity' of life by seeing the
dew on the grass or the foam on the water; when, yesterday all proud and
splendid, they have fallen from fortune into loneliness; or when, having been
dearly loved, they are neglected.8

In all his actions the Heian courtier aspired to miyabi — courtly refine-
ment— and it was this quality that became the most enduring aesthetic
legacy of Japan's classical age. Even after rough provincial warriors rose to
become the new rulers of the land in the late twelfth century, they in-
stinctively responded to and sought to perpetuate the courtly tradition as
epitomized in miyabi The turbulent centuries of the medieval age pro-
duced many new cultural pursuits that catered to the tastes of various
classes of society, including warriors, merchants, and even peasants. Yet,
coloring nearly all these pursuits was miyabiy reflected in a fundamental
preference on the part of the Japanese for the elegant, the restrained, and
the subtly suggestive. There is indeed a strong temptation to assert that
miyabi — as first codified, so to speak, in the poems of the Kokinshu — has
constituted the most basic theme in Japanese aesthetics. As one Western
authority has observed, “Nothing in the West can compare with the role
which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian
period”; and "the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in
evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9

Closely related to miyabi was the concept of mono no aware , which can
be translated as a "sensitivity to things” or, perhaps, a "capacity to be
moved by things.” Mono no aware , or simply aware , appeared as a phrase
of poetry in the Man'ydshu of the Nara period, but did not assume its
principal aesthetic connotations until the high age of Heian culture, be-
ginning about the time of the Kokinshu. In the discussion of Shinto in
Chapter 1 , we observed that there has run through history the idea that
the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature
before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and

The Court at Its Zenith

religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people.
And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have
always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emo-
tions. If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolu-
tion of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an
aesthetic. Ki no Tsurayuki, in his preface to the Kokinshu , was the first
to describe the workings of this aesthetic. For example, when inquiring
(in the opening passage of the preface, quoted above) whether anyone can
resist singing — or composing poetry — upon “hearing the warbler sing
among the blossoms and the frog in his fresh waters,” Tsurayuki said, in
effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and sponta-
neously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are
moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be
moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings
of people, a capacity that Tsurayuki, at least, believed would directly lead
to aesthetic expression.

Because of the particular Japanese liking, already noted, for the perish-
able beauties of nature and because of the acute Japanese sensitivity to
the passage of time, mono no aware has always been tinged with sadness
and melancholy. Some commentators have sought to convey this sense
by translating the phrase as the “pathos of things.” But this is mislead-
ing, because it suggests that things can inherently possess qualities like
pathos or a pathetic beauty. Rather, in the Japanese tradition, such qual-
ities come into being only when people perceive them in things. In other
words, the Japanese have traditionally tended to the belief that beauty is
not in the object but is evoked by the subject (i.e., the perceiver).

In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana
also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature. The origins
of the mature prose of the Fujiwara epoch can only be roughly identi-
fied, although they seem to lie primarily in two early kinds of works, the
so-called tale (monogatari) and the private diary ( nikki ). The term “ mono -
gaiari” has been used loosely through much of Japanese history for a
wide variety of writings, from purely fictional prose to quasi-historical
records. In its earliest usage, however, monogatari meant certain super-
natural or fantastic tales that derived both from oral folk legends and
from Buddhist miracle stories written in Chinese. The oldest extant
monogatari of this type is The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter (Taketori Monoga-
tari), dating from the late ninth or tenth century. It is the story of an old
man who finds a princess in a piece of bamboo. The princess, upon grow-
ing into comely maidenhood, tantalizes various suitors by refusing to
marry them unless they perform hopelessly difficult deeds. Finally, when
she is embarrassingly faced with the amorous advances of the emperor
himself, the princess flies away to the moon.

The second kind of incipient Heian prose writing was the private diary.

The Court at Its Zenith

Public diaries or journals, written in Chinese, had been kept in Japan
since at least Nara times; but the private diary, if we think of it as an
accounting of daily events expressed in an intimate and personal mode,
could not truly be undertaken until the development of kana enabled
would-be diarists to write in the vernacular of their age. The earliest pri-
vate diary that we have is the Tosa Diary (Tosa Nikki) of Ki no Tsura-
yuki. Written about 935, it recounts Tsurayuki’s journey by boat to the
capital from the province of Tosa, where he had just concluded a term
as governor. The most distinctive feature of this work, as of all literary or
artistic diaries of the Heian period, is the inclusion of a large number of
poems. Many entries in the Tosa Diary , in fact, consist merely of a poem
or two with some brief comments about the circumstances that inspired
composition. For example:

Eleventh day: After a little rain the skies cleared. Continuing upriver, we
noticed a line of hills converging on the eastern bank. When we learned that
this is the Yawata Hachiman Shrine, there was great rejoicing and we humbly
abased ourselves in thanks. The bridge of Yamazaki came in sight at last, and
our feelings of joy could no longer be restrained. Here, close by the doji
Temple, our boat came to anchor; and here we waited, while various matters
were negotiated for the remainder of our journey. By the riverside, near the
temple, there were many willow trees, and one of our company, admiring
their reflection in the water, made the poem:

A pattern of wave ripples, woven— it seems —

On a loom of green willows reflected in the stream.10

One stimulus, then, to the evolution of Japanese prose seems to have
been the need to elucidate the reasons for writing poetry, a need that
can be traced back to certain explanatory notes appended to poems in
the Man'ydshu. In any event, prose has from this earliest time been
closely linked to poetry in the history of Japanese literature. In the dia-
ries of the Heian period, poems are presented as the distinct compositions
of one person to another and usually serve as a means for the expression
of their most strongly felt emotions. On the other hand, in such later lit-
erary forms as the no theatre of the medieval age and the bourgeois
novels and puppet plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
metrical lines of seven and five syllables were generally employed for
poetically toned renderings of the heightened, climactic passages of other-
wise prose narratives.

The opening lines of the Tosa Diary state: “It is said that diaries are
kept by men, but I shall see if a woman cannot also keep one.”11 Al-
though it is generally agreed that Ki no Tsurayuki wrote this earliest of
private diaries, he chose to use the subterfuge that it was kept by his
wife. An obvious reason for this was that men regarded Chinese as the
only proper and dignified medium for writing. Women, who had far less

The Court at Its Zenith

opportunity to learn Chinese, were the ones who turned most readily to
kana to express themselves in the vernacular, and it was they who be-
came the greatest writers of prose literature in the Heian period.

The first truly feminine diary was the late tenth century record
known as The Gossamer Years (Kagero Nikki), written by a woman iden-
tified only as the “mother of (Fujiwara no) Michitsuna.” Unlike the Tosa
Diary , which was kept on a day-to-day basis and seems to present events
as a fairly consistent and balanced chronology, The Gossamer Years is a
sporadic and uneven account spread over some twenty-one years, from
954 to 974. The entries for some days are exceedingly detailed, but there
are also long periods of time during which nothing at all is reported.
This loose handling of the diary form (in fact, much of this diary was
probably written toward the end of or even after the period it covers),
combined with the intensely personal and subjective character of the writ-
ing, makes The Gossamer Years very much like a kind of autobiography
or even an “I-novel”; and indeed the distinction between the diary and
the fictional tale was often quite vague in Heian literature.

Whereas the Tosa Diary is centered on a journey (a common theme in
diaries and other personal accounts), The Gossamer Years deals with an
equally popular theme, the romance. The mother of Michitsuna was
married to Fujiwara no Kaneie (929-90), who eventually became impe-
rial regent at court. Like most high-ranking Heian courtiers, Kaneie was
not a faithful husband, and after an affectionate beginning with his wife
(who bore him the boy Michitsuna), he began to neglect her for other
women. Most of The Gossamer Years deals with the author’s distress and
fretful resentment over the fact that her husband comes to call upon her
with less and less frequency. Left alone with little to break the tedium of
her sequestered existence (a fate all too common among Heian court
ladies), the mother of Michitsuna is driven to a neurotic outpouring of
self-pity and absorption with her own grievances to the exclusion of any
consideration for the feelings of others.

At the end of The Gossamer Years we find these forlorn remarks:

The weather was fairly good for the rest of the year, with only a few snow
flurries. ... I thought of how quickly the years had gone by, each with the
same unsatisfied longing. The old, inexhaustible sadness came back, and I
went through the rites for my ancestors, but absent-mindedly.

In the very next, and last, line of the book, however, we are told that
“Late on the eve of the new year there was a pounding outside ...” and
realize that Kaneie’s interest in the mother of Michitsuna is not entirely
exhausted.12

Another type of contemporary literature very similar to the private
diary was the poem-tale (uta-monogatari) , the most celebrated of which
is The Tales oflse (Ise Monogatari ), compiled sometime in the early tenth

The Court at Its Zenith

century. The Tales of Ise consists of 125 passages or episodes of varying
length, loosely grouped together, and each containing one or more
poems. Most of the poems deal with love, and particularly with the
romantic adventures of a great court lover and poet of the previous cen-
tury, Ariwara no Narihira (825-80). Quite likely The Tales of Ise was
compiled by one or more persons who gathered a collection of poems,
most of them by Narihira, and then placed them in narrative contexts by
drawing on biographical information concerning Narihira’s life. To the
foreigner, The Tales of Ise is apt to seem like a light and even insignificant
work, but it has been venerated by the Japanese through the centuries as
one of the greatest masterpieces in their literature. A typical passage
from The Tales of Ise goes like this:

In former times there lived a young nobleman named Narihira. Upon receiv-
ing the ceremony of initiation into manhood, he set forth upon a ceremonial
falconry excursion, to review his estates at the village of Kasuga, near the
former capital of Nara.

In the village there dwelt alone two young sisters possessed of a disturbing
beauty. The young nobleman gazed at the two secretly from the shade of the
enclosure around their house. It filled his heart with longing that in this rus-
tic village he should have found so unexpectedly such lovely maidens.

Removing the wide sleeve from the silk cloak he was wearing, Narihira
inscribed a verse upon it and sent it to the girls. The cloak he was wearing
bore a bold pattern of passionflowers:

Young maiden-flowers
Of Kasuga, you dye my cloak;

And wildly like them grows
This passion in my heart,

Abundantly, without end.

The maidens must have thought this eminently suited to the occasion, for it
was composed in the same mood as the well-known

For whom has my heart
Like the passionflower patterns
Of Michinoku
Been thrown into disarray?

All on account of you.

This is the kind of facile elegance in which the men of old excelled. n

The crowning achievement in the development of prose in the early and
middle Heian period was the completion shortly after 1000 of The Tale
of Genji (Genji Monogatari) , a massive novel by Murasaki Shikibu (978-
1016), a lady-in-waiting at court. In spite of the excellence of much other
Heian literature, it is Murasaki’s incomparable masterpiece that recreates
the age for us, or at least the age as seen through the eyes of the privileged

The Court at Its Zenith

Heian courtiers. The leading character of this novel, Genji, “The Shining
One,” was the son of an emperor by a low-ranking concubine and a para-
gon of all the Heian virtues: he was dazzlingly handsome, a great lover,
poet, calligrapher, musician and dancer, and the possessor of impeccable
taste in a society that was in a very real sense ruled by taste.

Like most of his peers, Genji, at least in his youth, had little official
business to occupy him at court, where affairs were controlled by a few
leading Fujiwara ministers. Instead, he devoted himself to the gentle
arts and especially to the pursuit of love, an endeavor that involved him
in a seemingly endless string of romantic entanglements. In Genji’s circle,
the typical love affair was conducted according to exacting dictates of
taste. Lovers delighted each other by exchanging poems written on fans
or on carefully selected and scented stationery, which they adorned with
delicate sprays of flowers. A faulty handwriting, a missed allusion, or a
poor matching of colors could quickly dampen a courtier’s ardor. On the
other hand, the scent of a delicately mixed perfume or the haunting
notes of a zithern on a soft summer night could excite his greatest pas-
sion and launch him recklessly on a romantic escapade whose outcome
was more than likely to have embarrassing and even disastrous results
both for the lovers and for others among the intimately associated mem-
bers of Heian courtier society.

In a famous scene that takes place one rainy night, when Genji and
his friends informally assess the merits of womanhood, there is this ex-
change between To no Chujo, a young Fujiwara, and Genji:

To no Chujo: “I have at last discovered that there exists no woman of whom
one can say ‘Here is perfection. This is indeed she; There are many who have
the superficial art of writing a good running hand, or if occasion requires of
making a quick repartee. But there are few who will stand the ordeal of any
further test. Usually their minds are entirely occupied by admiration for their
own accomplishments, and their abuse of all rivals creates a most unpleasant
impression. Some again are adored by over-fond parents. These have since
childhood been guarded behind lattice windows and no knowledge of them is
allowed to reach the outer-world, save that of their excellence in some
accomplishment or art; and this may indeed sometimes arouse our interest.
She is pretty and graceful and has not yet mixed at all with the world. Such a
girl by closely copying some model and applying herself with great industry
will often succeed in really mastering one of the minor and ephemeral arts.
Her friends are careful to say nothing of her defects and to exaggerate her
accomplishments, and while we cannot altogether trust their praise we can-
not believe that their judgment is entirely astray. But when we take steps to
test their statements we are invariably disappointed.”

He paused, seeming to be slightly ashamed of the cynical tone which he
had adopted, and added “I know my experience is not large, but that is the
conclusion I have come to so far.” Then Genji, smiling: “And are there any
who lack even one accomplishment?” “No doubt, but in such a case it is

The Court at Its Zenith

unlikely that anyone would be successfully decoyed. The number of those
who have nothing to recommend them and of those in whom nothing but
good can be found is probably equal. I divide women into three classes.
Those of high rank and birth are made such a fuss of and their weak points
are so completely concealed that we are certain to be told that they are para-
gons. About those of the middle class everyone is allowed to express his own
opinion, and we shall have much conflicting evidence to sift. As for the lower
classes, they do not concern us.”14

The Tale of Genji has long been held by Japanese critics to exemplify the
aesthetic quality of mono no aware , and indeed aware appears as an ad-
jective in the book (referring to things that are moving) no less than 1,018
times.

If mono no aware is the predominant mood of Heian literature, there is
at least one work — The Pillozv Book (Makura no Soshi) of Sei Shonagon
(dates unknown) — that exudes a quality quite the opposite, that of oka -
shi: “lightness” or “wit.” Like her near-contemporary Lady Murasaki,
Sei Shonagon also served as a lady-in-waiting at court. Her book (the title
presumably taken from the fact that she kept it close at hand — that is,
near or even in her wooden pillow) is a miscellany of jottings, listings,
anecdotes, aphorisms, and personal opinions. Sei had a keenly observant
eye, especially for human foibles, which she delighted in exploiting; and
indeed, with her assertiveness and biting tongue, she may be regarded as
a kind of forerunner of the militant women’s liberationist in her behavior
toward men. She records, for example, the following account of what
occurred when a courtier named Narimasa, whom she held in low
esteem, attempted to visit her secretly one night:

“May I presume to come in?” he said several times in a strangely husky and
excited voice. I looked up in amazement, and by the light of the lamp that
had been placed behind the curtain of state I could see that Narimasa was
standing outside the door, which he had now opened about half a foot. The
situation amused me. As a rule he would not have dreamt of indulging in
such lecherous behavior; as the Empress was staying in his house, he evi-
dently felt he could do as he pleased. Waking up the young woman next to
me I exclaimed, “Look who is here! What an unlikely sight!” They all sat up
and, seeing Narimasa by the door, burst into laughter. “Who are you?” I said.
“Don’t try to hide!” “Oh no,” he replied. “It’s simply that the master of the
house has something to discuss with the lady-in-waiting in charge.”

“It was your gate I was speaking about,” I said. “I don’t remember asking
you to open the sliding-door.”

“Yes indeed,” he answered. “It is precisely the matter of the gate that I
wanted to discuss with you, May I not presume to come in for a moment?”

“Really!” said one of the young women. “How unpleasant! No, he cer-
tainly cannot come in.”

“Oh, I see,” said Narimasa. “There are other young ladies in the room.”
Closing the door behind him, he left, followed by our loud laughter.15

The Court at Its Zenith

The Pillow Book is the earliest example of still another type of litera-
ture— the miscellany or “running brush” (zuihitsu) — that has enjoyed
much popularity in Japanese history. Along with the diary and the poem-
tale, the miscellany, like horizontal picture scrolls and linked verse, re-
flects the Japanese preference for the episodic and loosely joined, rather
than the long and unified, artistic form. The Tale of Genji, as a great, sus-
tained work, was exceptional. In literature the Japanese have concentrated
on polishing short passages, phrases, words, and even syllables — no better
proof of this exists than their consuming love for the waka — and have
been little inclined to think in terms of plot development or the carefully
constructed narrative line.

Although written in fifty-four chapters, The Tale of Genji is actually
divided into two major parts. The first centers on the life and loves of
Genji, and the second deals with the generation at court after Genji’s
death. The Genji chapters, despite their prevailing mood of sadness and
melancholy, portray a truly ideal society, a society whose members little
doubted that theirs was the best of worlds possible in this life. Genji and
his companions were not much given to philosophical speculation but
seem instinctively to have accepted the implications of esoteric Buddhism
that ultimate truth or reality lay in the very splendor of their own exis-
tence. Genji in particular represented the perfection of the Heian courtier,
and upon his death, as the opening lines of the book’s second part lament,
there was no one to take his place.

Among Genji’s successors, we find new doubts and psychological un-
certainties that alter the tone of the novel: there is almost a presentiment
in the book’s latter part of the momentous changes that within a century
or so were to bring about the decline of courtier society and the rise of a
provincial warrior class. Some historians have suggested that Heian aris-
tocratic society, even at its peak, was unbearably stultifying to all but the
privileged few — mostly members of the Fujiwara and imperial families
— who could aspire to advancement at court; that, despite the idealization
of court life in the earlier chapters of The Tale of Genjiy there was discon-
tent among many courtiers over their lot. No doubt the rumblings of the
military in the provinces, which mounted steadily during the eleventh
century, were also disquieting to the courtiers in spite of their outward
show of aloofness toward provincial affairs.

While the term monogatari was applied during the Fujiwara epoch to
such differing literary works as poem-tales and novels, it was also used
for a new type of historical writing. The Nihon Shoki had been produced
by the Nara court as the first of what was intended to be an ongoing
series of official histories of Japan, much like the dynastic histories of
China. As it turned out, six such national histories, covering up to the
year 887, were actually compiled. All were written in Chinese and, with

The Court at Its Zenith

the exception of the Nihon Shoki, were notably dull, consisting as they
did of a dry recitation of the facts and events of court government.

One reason for abandonment of the practice of compiling national
histories was the general turning away from Chinese-derived institutions
and patterns of behavior that accompanied the cessation of official mis-
sions to the continent in the latter part of the ninth century. Also, in the
same way that the newly acquired capacity to write in Japanese with the
use of kana encouraged the keeping of private diaries, people at court
were inspired to record the historical events of their age in a more color-
ful, personally interpretive fashion. Although not precisely the same in
structure, the national histories had been patterned on the highly formal
dynastic records of the great bureaucratic state of China. Yet Heian Japan
had not become a bureaucratic state on the order of China; and the
Heian courtiers, lax in matters of national administration, had become
ever more introspectively absorbed with their own ceremonially oriented
life in the capital. It was only natural that, in history as in literature, they
should develop new mediums of composition more suitable to the ex-
pression of their sentiments concerning the public and private affairs of
Kyoto courtier society.

The new form of history writing that evolved at this time is called the
historical tale (rekishi monogatari); it was much influenced by the fic-
tional tale, especially The Tale of Genji. A product of the blurring of his-
tory and literature, or fact and fiction, it can be regarded as a kind of
“embellished history.” The thinking that brought history and literature
together in this form is revealingly suggested in a scene from the Genji
itself. In this scene, Genji visits Tamakazura, one of the ladies living in
his Kyoto residence and the one who is most given to reading romantic
tales (monogatari). After first teasing Tamakazura about allowing herself
to be deceived by stories that she knows perfectly well are not true,
Genji, becoming serious, says: “Amid all the fabrication [in monogatari]
I must admit that I do find real emotions and plausible chains of events.

. . . [The monogatari ] have set down and preserved happenings from the
age of the gods to our own. The Chronicles of Japan ( Nihon Shoki) and
the rest are a mere fragment of the whole truth. It is your [monogatari]
that fill in the details.”16 To Genji, Nihon Shoki and the other national
histories told only part of the story of the past: the great events and hap-
penings. The details about how people actually lived, felt, and thought
had to be filled in by others in a “plausible” manner.

The first of the historical tales was A Tale of Flowering Fortunes (Eiga
Monogatari), written in the mid-eleventh century by the court lady Aka-
zome Emon (dates unknown), who unabashedly modeled her work, in
structure and style, on the Genji Whereas the six national histories were
written in Chinese, Flowering Fortunes is in Japanese. And the fact that
the author of this first historical monogatari was a woman is fitting, since

The Court at Its Zenith

women had already taken the lead in writing a new kind of fiction — the
fictional monogatari — by taking advantage of the capacity to write the
Japanese language presented by the invention of kana.

Covering the period from about 946 until 1028, Flowering Fortunes is
a woman’s-eye view of events and affairs at the Heian court, including
marriages, births, deaths, personal rivalries, and romantic liaisons. Its
title refers to the flowering fortunes or flourishing of the Fujiwara, espe-
cially under Michinaga (966-1027), who is generally regarded as the
greatest of the imperial regents. The awe with which Akazome Emon
beholds the resplendent Michizane is well expressed in the following
passage:

Those who prosper must decline; where there is meeting, parting will follow.
All is cause and effect; nothing is eternal. Fortunes that prospered yesterday
may decline today. Even spring blossoms and autumn leaves are spoiled and
lose their beauty when they are enshrouded by spring haze and autumn mist.
And after a gust of wind scatters them, they are nothing but debris in a gar-
den or froth on the water. It is only the flowering fortunes of this lord [Michi-
naga] that, now having begun to bloom, will not be hidden from sight during
a thousand years of spring hazes and autumn mists. No wind disturbs their
branches, which grow ever more redolent with scent — rare and splendid as
udumbara blossoms, peerlessly fragrant as the blue lotus, fairest of water-
flowers.17

Having lyrically described the most fundamental of all Buddhist truths,
the impermanence of all things, Akazome Emon asserts that, alone
among things, the flowering fortunes of Michinaga will not be governed
by this truth but will continue — through Michinaga himself and his
progeny — for a thousand years (forever?).

Glorification of the Fujiwara and particularly Michinaga is even more
pronounced in the second of the historical tales, The Great Mirror ( Oka -
garni), which was probably written by a courtier in the late eleventh or
early twelfth century and covers the period 850-1025 (the same period
as that of Flowering Fortunes , but with a century added at the beginning).
Whereas Flowering Fortunes is written in chronological form, The Great
Mirror is organized according to “annals and biographies.”18 The annals
are the records of emperors and are uniformly brief, occupying only
about 10 percent of the entire work. The biographies, on the other hand,
are those of the prominent Fujiwara who served at court during the
reigns of these emperors and account for the work’s remaining 90 per-
cent. In short, The Great Mirror is, first and foremost, a history of the
Fujiwara leading inexorably to the family’s pinnacle of grandeur and glory
in the age of Michinaga. In the following passage, the author, elaborating
upon the “cult of personality” of Michinaga first propounded by Aka-
zome Emon in A Tale of Flowering Fortunes , goes so far as to liken him to
two of the greatest culture heroes in early Japanese history, Prince Sho-

The Court at Its Zenith

toku and Kukai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, and then to a god or
a buddha:

[Michinaga] is in a class by [himself] . He is a man who enjoys special protec-
tion from the gods of heaven and earth. Winds may rage and rains may fall
day after day, but the skies will clear and the ground will dry out two or three
days before he plans anything. Some people call him a reincarnation of
[Prince Shotoku]; others say he is [Kukai], reborn to make Buddhism flourish.
Even to the censorious eye of old age, he seems not an ordinary mortal but
an awesome manifestation of a god or a buddha.19

Whereas formerly they had scarcely questioned that spiritual fulfill-
ment could be found in this world, the courtiers by the eleventh century
increasingly cherished the thought of attaining salvation in the next. Such
salvationism was not new to Japan but had been introduced to it as early
as the seventh century in the teachings of Pure Land Buddhism. Pure
Land Buddhism was based on adoration of the transcendent buddha
Amida, who an eternity earlier had vowed to save all beings, provided
only that they placed their faith wholly in him. By simply reciting the nem-
butsu (an invocation in praise of Amida),20 an individual could ensure that
upon death he would be transported to the blissful “pure land” of Amida
in the western realm of the universe.

Amidism was made particularly appealing to the courtiers of the late
Heian period by the popular doctrine of mappo, “the latter days of the
Buddhist law.” This doctrine held that after the death of Gautama, some
five centuries b.c., Buddhism would pass through three great ages: an
age of the flourishing of the law, of its decline, and finally of its disap-
pearance in the degenerate days of mappo . Once the age of mappo com-
menced— and by Japanese calculations that would be in the year 1052 —
individuals could no longer hope to achieve Buddhist enlightenment by
their own efforts, as had the followers of Hinayana and even of the Maha-
yanist sects of Shingon and Tendai esotericism. There would be no alter-
native during mappo but to throw oneself on the saving grace of another,
such as Amida, in the hope of attaining rebirth in paradise.

Eventually, it was the Pure Land sect, with its simple message of uni-
versal salvation, that provided the practical means for the spread of Bud-
dhism to all classes of Japanese in the medieval era. But in its first phase
of development in Japan, Amidism was embraced — and interpreted in
characteristically aesthetic terms — by the Heian courtiers. In the Ojd
Ydshu (Essentials of Salvation), for example, the Tendai priest Genshin
(942-1017) urged the practice of the nembutsu and vividly pictured the
attractions of the pure land:

After the believer is born into this land and when he experiences the plea-
sures of the first opening of the lotus, his joy becomes a hundred times
greater than before. It is comparable to a blind man gaining sight for the first

The Court at Its Zenith

time, or to entering a royal palace directly after leaving some rural region.
Looking at his own body, it becomes purplish gold in color. He is gowned
naturally in jeweled garments. Rings, bracelets, a crown of jewels, and other
ornaments in countless profusion adorn his body. And when he looks upon
the light radiating from the Buddha, he obtains pure vision, and because of
his experiences in former lives, he hears the sounds of all things. And no
matter what color he may see or what sound he may hear, it is a thing of
marvel. Such is the ornamentation of space above that the eye becomes lost
in the traces of clouds. The melody of the wheel of the wonderful Law as it
turns, flows throughout this land of jeweled sound. Palaces, halls, forests, and
ponds shine and glitter everywhere. Flocks of wild ducks, geese, and man-
darin ducks fly about in the distance and near at hand. One may see multi-
tudes from all the worlds being born into this land like sudden showers of
rain.21

One of the favorite themes in Fujiwara art was the raigo , a pictorial
representation of the coming of Amida at the time of death to lead the
way to the pure land (fig. 23); and among the most famous raigo paint-
ings is a triptych traditionally attributed to Genshin, who was a fine artist
as well as a scholar (even though this work was obviously done by some-
one else a century or more after Genshin Js death). Amida is shown
descending to earth on a great swirl of clouds in the company of twenty-
five bodhisattvas, some playing musical instruments, some clasping their
hands in prayer, and still others holding forth votive offerings. The formal
way in which the figure of Amida, facing directly frontward, has been
inserted into the center of the picture gives it a stiffly iconographic ap-
pearance; yet the gentle and even smiling expressions of all the figures —
Amida as well as the host of bodhisattvas — are strikingly different from
the fierce, unearthly visages of Jogan art. The Fujiwara epoch, in litera-
ture as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By
contrast, the earlier Jogan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric),
and “masculine.”

The favor that Amidism came to enjoy among the courtiers in the
eleventh century is significantly revealed in the conduct of the regent
Michinaga, who in his heyday had joyfully exclaimed in verse his con-
tentment with the world:

The full moon makes me feel
That the world is mine indeed;

Like the moon I shine
Unveiled by clouds.

Yet, as death approached, Michinaga turned his thoughts ever more to
Amida and the hereafter. Following a practice that became common in
Japan, he sought in his final moments to facilitate Amida’s descent to
lead him to the pure land by facing his bed toward the west and holding
in his hand a colored string attached to Amida in a raigo painting. Later

The Court at Its Zenith

Fig. 23 Raigo y “The Descent of Amida and the Celestial Company” (courtesy of
the Seattle Art Museum , Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection)

artists, in their desire to emphasize the rapidity with which true believers
could expect to be transported to the pure land, painted raigo that showed
Amida and the heavenly host coming down toward the viewer in great
haste (rather than in the gentle, floating manner of the work described
above). The raigo scene was even reenacted dramatically, and there is at

Fig. 24 Byodoin Temple (Consulate General of Japan, New York)

least one recorded case of a man who, on his deathbed, engaged a group
of priests to visit him dressed as Amida and the twenty-five attendant
bodhisattvas.

The temple where Michinaga died, the Hojoji , is no longer in exis-
tence, but we are told that he had it built with the intent of reproducing
on earth the beauties and delights of the pure land. Michinaga ’s son, the
regent Yorimichi (992-1074), also sought to recreate the pure land in the
Byodoin, a temple at Uji, several miles to the south of Kyoto (fig. 24).

The Court at Its Zenith

Fig. 25 Statue of Amida buddha by Jocho at the Byodoin Temple (Consulate
General of Japan, New York)

Opened in 1052, the first year of mappo, the Byodoin has the finest re-
maining examples of Fujiwara period architecture, including the much
admired Phoenix Hall, a light, elegantly designed structure that was
apparently given its name in later times because it is shaped like a phoenix
(or, at least, like a bird), with wings extended in flight. Inside the hall is
a sculptural representation of the raigo , with a central image of Amida
and, attached to the upper parts of the walls, small, gracefully shaped
figures of the bodhisattvas, adorned with halos and riding wisps of clouds.
The Amida image, which is made of wood and has the characteristic
gentleness and courtly air of Fujiwara art, is the work of Jocho (d. 1057),
the most celebrated sculptor of his age and one of the first persons in
Japanese history to receive distinction and honor from the court as an
artist of individuality and not merely as a craftsman (fig. 25).

Although no examples of domestic architecture remain from the Heian
period, we know from written accounts and picture scrolls what sort of
mansions the courtiers built for themselves during the age of Fujiwara
ascendancy. The chief architectural style for aristocratic homes, known
as shinden construction, consisted in fact of a collection of one-story
structures laid out very much like the Byodoin Temple (fig. 26).

warn

The Court at Its Zenith

Inasmuch as the courtiers preferred to live within the city limits of
Kyoto, they were obliged for want of space to build their homes on fairly
small plots of land, usually not more than two and a half acres or so in
size. The typical shinden mansion consisted of a main building facing
southward — the shinden or “living quarters” of the master of the family
— and three secondary buildings to the east, west, and north. All four
structures were raised about a foot above the ground and were connected
by covered corridors. There were also two additional corridors leading
southward to miniature fishing pavilions that bordered on a small lake
with an artificial island in its center. The lake was usually fed by a stream
flowing from the northeast, often under the mansion itself, and it was by
the stream’s banks that the courtiers enjoyed gathering for poetry par-
ties. At such parties, a cup of rice wine was floated downstream and, as
it came to each guest, he was obliged to take it from the water, drink, and
recite a verse.

Like modem Japanese homes, those of the Heian courtiers had parti-
tions, sliding doors, and shutters that could readily be removed to make
smaller rooms into larger ones and to open the whole interior of a build-
ing to the out-of-doors. Also, like most homes in Japan today, the shinden
were sparsely furnished. Although chairs were coming into general use in
China about this time, they were not adopted by the Heian Japanese
except for certain ceremonial purposes. A few chests, braziers, and small
tables were the only objects likely to be left out in the open in shinden
rooms and not stored away after use.

One item of furniture that was unique to courtier society was the so-
called screen of state, behind which ladies ensconced themselves when
receiving visitors. Conspicuously depicted in the twelfth-century picture
scrolls based on The Tale of Genji, the screens of state were wooden
frames, several feet in height, with draperies hung loosely from their
crosspieces (a screen of state can be observed in the foreground of fig.
27, p. 85). They could be easily moved about, and often came to repre-
sent the final fragile barrier to the Heian gallant in his quest to consum-
mate a romantic liaison.

The Advent of a New Age

The haniwa figurines of armor-clad warriors and their mounts and the
numerous military accoutrements dating from the protohistoric tomb
period are plain evidence that the fighting traditions of the Japanese go
back to remote antiquity. There is, moreover, the strong likelihood that
these traditions were nourished uninterruptedly in the provinces even
during the centuries when an elegant and refined cultural life was evolv-
ing under continental influence in the central region of Japan.

One of the principal steps taken by the court to strengthen its control
as a central government following the Great Reform of 645 was the estab-
lishment of a military system of militia units in provinces throughout the
country. These units, which were under the control of the provincial
governors, comprised foot soldiers conscripted from the peasantry and
mounted fighters, drawn from locally powerful families, who served as
officers. From the beginning, however, the peasant foot soldiers, who,
under Chinese influence, used the crossbow as their principal weapon,
proved to be unsatisfactory in battle. This was particularly evident during
the fighting in the north against the Emishi tribesmen in the late eighth
and early ninth centuries (described in Chapter 3).

In 792, two years before the move of the capital to Heian and even
while expeditions, recruited from the militia units, were still being sent
against the Emishi, the court abandoned conscription. Thenceforth it
sought to use the locally powerful families to provide mounted fighters,
when necessary, to deal with rebellions and other disturbances in the
provinces. Although court administration of the provinces in general de-
clined during the early Heian period, its provincial governments contin-
ued to be important sources of weapons and supplies for these fighters
on horseback, who began to take shape as a distinct warrior class from
about the late ninth or early tenth century.

The mounted fighter of ancient Japan relied primarily on two weapons,
the sword and the bow, of which the latter was by far the more impor-
tant. We can observe this, for example, in the description of the fighter’s
profession as the “way of the bow and horse,” a phrase that continued to

The Advent of a New Age

be used to describe the “warrior way” even after the bow was supplanted,
centuries later, by other weapons as the primary instruments of war.

The process by which a provincial warrior class emerged in Japan was
complex and differed from region to region; yet one area in particular —
the eastern provinces of the Kanto — became its true spawning ground.
From earliest times the Kanto had been renowned as the source of the
country's best fighters. Men of the Kanto, which, along with Mutsu
province directly to the north, produced the finest horses in Japan,
learned riding and the other military skills, including archery, from
infancy. The Kanto was still rugged frontier country, with vast tracts of
open fields to draw adventuresome settlers, and the records give accounts
of feuding there over land and power. From at least the early tenth cen-
tury, chieftains arose in the Kanto to form fighting bands of locally bred
mounted warriors. At first, the members of these bands were almost ex-
clusively related by blood, but with the passage of time the chieftains
also incorporated outsiders, whom they embraced in feudal lord-vassal
relationships. Increasingly, the bands engaged in struggles, formed
leagues, and established hegemonies; and in time great leaders appeared
to contend for military control over ever larger territories, up to one or
more provinces.

Warfare in the Kanto and elsewhere, which by mid-Heian times had
become virtually the exclusive pursuit of equestrian fighters, probably
seldom involved armies of more than a few hundred and was highly rit-
ualized. When armies clashed, warriors from both sides usually paired
off and fought one against one, first with bow and arrow and then, upon
moving in closely, with swords. The aim of close combat was to unseat
one's foe, then leap down and kill him with a dirk. As a trophy of battle
and as proof for later claims for reward, the victorious warrior typically
took his foe's head.

Even though the provincial warriors never lost their awe and admira-
tion for the culture of the imperial court, their fundamental values were
the antithesis of those of the Heian courtiers. They were samurai — men
who “served” — and they behaved in accordance with an unwritten code
that stressed manly arrogance, fighting prowess, unswerving loyalty to
one’s overlord, and a truculent pride in family lineage.1

Paradoxical though it may sound, the greatest samurai leaders came
from a background of courtier society itself. The rise of the Fujiwara to
preponderant power in Kyoto stifled opportunity for others at court, in-
cluding those from the less privileged branches of the Fujiwara and even
members of the imperial family. Many of these individuals left Kyoto to
accept appointments to offices in the provincial governments. Settling
permanently in the provinces after expiration of their terms of office,
they took up warrior ways, became the leaders of bands, and attracted

The Advent of a New Age

members of lesser samurai families as their supporters and vassals. Ulti-
mately, two great clans descended from princely forebears — the Taira and
Minamoto — emerged to the forefront of samurai society and became the
principal contenders for warrior supremacy of the land.2

Although at first there was no clear territorial division of influence, by
the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries one of the main branches of
the Minamoto came to exert sway over the Kanto, having honed its mar-
tial powers in two long, grueling wars fought in the late 1 1 00s against
independent-minded satraps in Mutsu and Dewa provinces to the north. 3
Meanwhile, a branch of the Taira from Ise province steadily acquired
land and influence in the central and western provinces. Control of the
fertile Kanto, a region some ten times greater than the plain of the cen-
tral provinces, eventually proved decisive in enabling the Minamoto to
found the first warrior government in Japan at Kamakura in 1185. But
proximity to the court in Kyoto gave the Ise Taira an early advantage
over the Minamoto in the protracted competition and conflict that en-
sured between these two samurai houses from about the middle of the
twelfth century.

The Taira benefited especially by an important political development
at court in the late eleventh century. During the last years of the regent
Yorimichi (990-1074), founder of the Byodoin Temple at Uji, Fujiwara
power in Kyoto began to wane, and the first of a series of abdicated sov-
ereigns arose to reassert the traditional claim of the imperial family to
rule in fact as well as in name. The abdicated sovereigns sought further
to weaken the Fujiwara monopoly of court government by engaging as
their aides and officials members of other houses, including samurai of
the Ise Taira. Under the patronage of the abdicated emperors, the Ise
Taira became the first noncourtiers to gain ceremonial admittance to the
imperial palace. They also received extensive grants in estate lands and
appointments to various provincial governorships in the western prov-
inces of Honshu and in Kyushu.

Despite the assertiveness of the abdicated emperors, political condi-
tions in Kyoto steadily deteriorated during the twelfth century. By mid-
century, serious divisions had appeared within the Fujiwara and impe-
rial families, and quarrelsome samurai of both the Taira and Minamoto
clans were gathering in ever greater numbers in Kyoto. In the 1 150s, the
tranquility of the “flowery capital” was rudely shattered by two fierce
clashes of arms. The first of these, in 1156, found the Taira and Mina-
moto intermingled on both sides, but the second, in 1 1 59, resulted in a
resounding victory of the Ise Taira over their archrivals and the inaugu-
ration of some twenty years of Taira ascendancy at court under the leader-
ship of Kiyomori (111 8-8 1 ) .

The age of Ise Taira ascendancy was a transitional period in Japanese

The Advent of a Nezv Age

history. Although samurai warriors, the Taira attempted to follow in the
footsteps of the Fujiwara courtiers by marrying into the imperial family
and assuming many of the highest ministerial positions at court. In thus
devoting their attention to traditional court politics and ignoring the
pressing need for new administrative controls in the provinces, the Taira
directly contributed to their own downfall, which occurred in a climactic
renewal of struggle with the Minamoto from 1 180 to 1 185.^

One of the chief sources of information about the rise and fall of the
Ise Taira is a work entitled The Tale of the Heike (another name for the
Taira), the finest of a genre of writing known as war tales. The war tales,
all of which were anonymously written or compiled, are accounts of
warriors and their battles based on actual events that have been embel-
lished, and hence are partly history and partly fiction. The first of the
tales was composed sometime in the late tenth century and deals with
the rebellion of one Taira no Masakado (d. 940) in the Kanto during
9 39-40 Tales continued to be produced up to the seventeenth century,
but the period of their greatest flourishing was the early medieval age,
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Some of the war tales were composed shortly after the events they de-
scribe, while others were put into writing on the basis of an earlier oral
tradition. The Tale of the Heike , which recounts the rise of the Ise Taira
and their eventual fall and annihilation in the Minamoto-Taira war of
1 180-85, was probably first compiled as a book in the early thirteenth
century. But subsequently the Heike was greatly elaborated and expanded
by guilds of blind Buddhist monks who, chanting the tale’s episodes to
the accompaniment of a kind of lute known as the biwa, entertained
audiences everywhere as they journeyed around the country. From the
body of war tales that spans the medieval centuries, those — such as the
Heike — that deal with the twelfth-century clashes between Taira and
Minamoto have remained especially popular among the Japanese through
the ages and have been the stuff from which countless plays, dramatic
dances, movies, and the like have been fashioned. Perhaps the best proof
of the ongoing popularity of the Heike in particular lies in the fact that,
as we will see in the next chapter, virtually all the warrior plays of the no
theatre (an artistic creation of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries)
are based on characters and stories from it.

The later war tales degenerated into mere recitations of the intermi-
nable battles of the middle ages, one often indistinguishable from an-
other. But in the Heike and a few others we have a priceless repository of
the ethos of the medieval samurai. Despite the apparent lust of the
samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in
later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from
the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji
the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier

The Advent of a New Age

society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the
next. Yet the very fact that the courtiers conceived of Amida’s western
paradise as an idealization of their own world, and tried to recreate it in
architecture and landscape, reveals that they were far from prepared to
discard the temporal values they had long cherished. How different are
the sentiments expressed in the opening lines of the Heike , a work that
in many ways served to announce the advent of the medieval age:

The sound of the bell of the Gion Temple tolls the impermanence of all
things, and the hue of the Sala tree's blossoms reveals the truth that those
who flourish must fade. The proud ones do not last forever, but are like the
dream of a spring night. Even the mighty will perish, just like dust before the
wind.6

It is the age of mappo , the “latter days of the Buddhist law” (discussed
in the last chapter), and the Heike, suffused with mappo sentiment, tells
the story of how the Ise Taira, full of arrogance and hubris, have, under
the leadership of Kiyomori, forced their way to the heights of court
society, only to suffer grievous failure and destruction in their five-year
war with the resurgent Minamoto. In the larger sense, however, the Taira
are only the most spectacular example of decline in a time governed by
the dark, inscrutable laws of mappo . In their years of residence in Kyoto
the Taira have become more and more courtier-like; and in the Heike they
can even be seen as surrogates for the courtiers, who are also in rapid
decline and about to lose out historically as Japan’s ruling class to the
emerging warrior elite represented by the Minamoto.

The courtly qualities of the Ise Taira are highlighted throughout the
Heike: a flute, for example, is found on the body of a youthful Taira, and
his killer, a Minamoto adherent, observes that none among the Mina-
moto was likely to carry such a thing into battle; another Taira, before
going to his death, beseeches a famous poet to include one or more of
his poems in an anthology that the emperor has ordered the poet to
compile; and still another Taira, certain that he too will die in battle,
returns a famous lute, once prized by emperors, that has been entrusted
to him because of his uncommon musical talent. As we read the first
half of the Heike, we may feel that the Taira richly deserve what we
know is coming to them in the Minamoto-Taira war of the work’s
second half; but once the war has started, our sympathies are increas-
ingly drawn to them, largely because they are portrayed as courtier-like,
elegantly bewildered, and not at all the military match of the ferocious
Minamoto. One of the saddest and most courtier-like passages in the
Heike describes the Taira flight to the western provinces after they have
been driven from Kyoto in 1183. They have stopped for one night at
Fukuhara on the Inland Sea before setting out, forlorn, on their west-
ward journey:

The Advent of a New Age

As dawn broke, the Taira set fire to the Fukuhara palace and, with the
emperor, they all boarded the boats. Departing the capital had been more
painful, but still their feelings of regret were great indeed. Smoke at evening
time from seaweed burned by fisherfolk, the cries of deer on mountain peaks
at dawn, waves lapping the shore, moonbeams bathing their tear-drenched
sleeves, crickets chirping in the grasses — no sight met their eyes nor sounds
reached their ears that failed to evoke sadness or pierce their hearts. Yester-
day they were tens of thousands of horsemen aligned at Osaka Barrier; today,
as they loosened their mooring lines on waves in the western sea, they num-
bered a mere seven thousand. The sky was cloudy and the sea calm as dusk
approached. Lonely islands were shrouded in evening mists; the moon
floated on the sea. Cleaving the waves to the distant horizon and drawn ever
onward by the tides, the boats seemed to row up through the clouds in the
sky. Days had passed, and they were already separated far from the moun-
tains and rivers of the capital, which lay behind the clouds. They seemed to
have gone as far as they could go. All had come to an end, except their end-
less tears.7

The Taira name has come down through the ages as synonymous with
the proud and the mighty who “will perish in the end, like dust before
the wind.” Indeed, they have even given rise to the popular saying “Even
the haughty Taira (Heike) will not last long” (Ogoru Heike wa hisashi-
karazu). But, in truth, the Taira have been to a large extent the victims
of the process of literary embellishment that the Heike underwent. There
is no historical evidence, for example, to suggest that Kiyomori was the
cruel, power-mad villain that the Heike makes him out to be; the Ise
Taira, as a warrior clan, were not nearly as inept militarily as they are de-
picted in the Heike; and the Taira as aristocratized, courtier-warriors re-
flects not so much historical fact as the artistic tastes of the Muromachi
period (the fourteenth century), when what became the most widely dis-
seminated version of the Heike was compiled.8

Taira ascendancy at court in Kyoto was brief, and contributed little if
anything to the improvement of rulership in Japan. But in one of their
major pursuits — overseas trade and intercourse — the Taira opened the
door to a new flow of influence from China that significantly affected both
the direction and the tempo of cultural developments in medieval Japan.

Although official relations with the tottering T’ang dynasty had been
terminated in the late ninth century, contacts with the continent were
never completely severed, and throughout the tenth and eleventh centu-
ries private traders continued to operate out of Kyushu, particularly the
ancient port of Hakata. Moreover, the Heian court, even though it stead-
fastly refused to dispatch its own missions again to China, kept officials
permanently stationed at a commandery near Hakata to oversee the im-
port trade and to requisition choice luxury goods for sale and distribution
among the Kyoto aristocrats. When the Taira, with the backing of the

The Advent of a New Age

abdicated emperors at court, became influential in the western provinces
in the twelfth century, they naturally took a keen interest in — and even-
tually monopolized — the highly profitable maritime trade with China.

China of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) was a changed country from
the expansionist, cosmopolitan land of T’ang times that the Japanese had
so assiduously copied in their Great Reform several centuries earlier.
China could no longer serve as a giant conduit for the flow of world art
and culture to remote Japan. From its founding, the Sung dynasty was
harassed by barbarian tribes pressing in from the north and northwest.
And indeed, just as the Taira assumed a commanding position in Japan’s
burgeoning overseas trade in the early twelfth century. North China fell
to foreign invaders. The Sung — known henceforth as the Southern Sung
(1 127-1279) — moved its capital from Kaifeng in the north to Hangchow
south of the Yangtze delta, where it remained until overthrown by the
Mongols of Khubilai Khan in 1279.

Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of
great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by
the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and govern-
mental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted
that this was the age when China entered its ‘‘early modern” phase. The
Sung was also a brilliant period culturally. No doubt most of the major
developments of the Sung in art, religion, and philosophy would in time
have been transmitted to Japan. But the fortuitous combination of desire
on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the
vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded
the process of transmission.

One of the earliest and most important results of this new wave of
cultural transmission from the continent was a revival of interest in Japan
in pure scholarship. The Nara court, following the Chinese model, had
founded a central college in the capital and had directed that branch
colleges be established in the various provinces. The ostensible purpose
of this system of colleges, which by the mid-Nara period had evolved a
fourfold curriculum of Confucian classics, literature, law, and mathe-
matics, was to provide a channel of advancement in the court bureau-
cracy for sons of the lower (including the provincial) aristocracy. But in
actual practice very little opportunity to advance was provided, and the
bestowal of courtier ranks and offices continued to be made almost
entirely on grounds of birth. Before long, the college system languished,
and the great courtier families assumed responsibility through private
academies for the education of their own children. Moreover, as the cour-
tiers of the early Heian period became increasingly infatuated with litera-
ture (that is, belles-lettres), they almost totally neglected the other fields
of academic or scholarly pursuit. Courtier society offered scant reward

The Advent of a New Age

to the individual who, say, patiently acquired a profound knowledge of
the Analects of Confucius; yet it liberally heaped laurels upon and prom-
ised literary immortality to the author of superior poems.

The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age
for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation
of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was
greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chi-
nese several centuries earlier.

Japanese visitors to Sung China were much impressed by the general
availability of printed books on a great variety of subjects, including his-
tory, Buddhism, Confucianism, literature, medicine, and geography, and
carried them in ever greater numbers back to Japan. By the time of the
Taira supremacy, collections of Chinese books had become important
status symbols among upper-class Japanese. Kiyomori is said, for exam-
ple, to have gone to extravagant lengths to obtain a 1 , 000-volume ency-
clopedia whose export was prohibited by the Sung. Some courtiers con-
fided in their diaries that they had little or no personal interest in these
books but nevertheless felt constrained to acquire them for the sake of
appearances. Yet, the Chinese books brought to Japan about this time,
in the thousands and even in the tens of thousands, not only provided
the nuclei for many new libraries but motivated the Japanese to print
their own books and to a great extent stimulated and made possible the
varied and energetic scholarly activities of the coming medieval age.

One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian
period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting
that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth cen-
tury. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is,
Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chi-
nese pictures.”

Painting in Japan from the seventh to the ninth centuries, like art in
general, had been done almost entirely in the Chinese manner. Portraits
of people, for example, showed Chinese-looking features, and even land-
scapes were mere imitations of noted places in China. The evolution of
Yamato pictures from the ninth century on constituted a transition from
this kind of copying to more original painting that dealt with Japanese
people in Japanese settings.

Nearly all of the early Yamato pictures were painted either on folding
screens or sliding doors. Regrettably, like the shinden mansions in which
they were kept, none has survived. Yet there are abundant descriptions
in the records of what they looked like; and in the background scenes of
some of the later narrative scrolls — for example, the twelfth-century
works based on The Tale of Genji (see fig, 27) — we can glimpse screens
and doors pictorially decorated in the Yamato style.

SI Hl41

P»? m'\

The Advent of a New Age

These early Yamato pictures, which reached their peak of popularity
in the Fujiwara epoch, depicted either pure landscapes or landscapes in
which courtiers were shown at their leisure: viewing the moon, gathering
the first blossoms of spring, or simply standing amid the tranquil beauties
of nature. The two major themes were the seasons and famous places of
Japan.

It is doubtful, as suggested at the end of Chapter 2, that any other
people in history has ever been as absorbed as the Japanese, in their lit-
erature and art, with the seasons and the varying moods they bring. In
works of prose, such as The Tale of Genji , there is a constant awareness of
the seasons and their intimate association with the life cycle of the Heian
courtier; and in waka poetry, we find numerous words and phrases that
stereotypically identify the time of year, such as the “morning mists” of
spring or the “cry of the deer” in autumn. Yamato pictures, as well, came
to have many associative subjects linked with each of the seasons: for
example, the morning glories, lotus ponds, and Kamo festival of summer,
and winter’s mountain villages, waterfowl, and the sacred kagura dance.

A unique feature of the Yamato pictures of famous places was that
they were painted for the most part by people who had never seen these
places, except possibly the ones closest to Kyoto. In other words, the
Yamato artists produced provincial scenes either as they were tradition-
ally supposed to appear or as the artists imagined them to appear. There
could be no more telling proof than this of the extent to which the
Heian courtiers had come to conceive of the world outside Kyoto and its
environs in almost purely abstract, aesthetic terms.

With development of the kana syllabary and the use of kana for the
writing of waka , Yamato artists began to add poems to their pictures ap-
propriate to the particular seasons and settings they were depicting. They
thus joined together three forms of art: poetry, calligraphy, and painting.
And in the process they contributed a narrative or descriptive element to
their works that led from the painting of individual scenes on screens and
doors to the use of Yamato pictures as illustrations in books, and finally,
about the turn of the twelfth century, to the development of narrative
scrolls (perhaps most conveniently referred to henceforth as emaki to
avoid confusion with the earlier types of Yamato pictures) .

Although horizontal handscrolls had long been used for pictorial pur-
poses in China, it was the Japanese who in the late Heian period came to
employ them in the creation of a major art form. The oldest, and in many
ways the most splendid, of the emaki extant from Heian times are the
Genji Scrolls, probably painted sometime around the mid-twelfth century
(fig. 27). There may originally have been as many as twenty of these
scrolls but only four have come down to us. Strictly speaking, the Genji
Scrolls are not fully narrative pictures, since they do not possess the hori-
zontal flow of movement and the blending of scenes one into another that

The Advent of a New Age

became the dominant characteristic of subsequent emaki. Rather, the
Genji Scrolls consist of separate scenes with sections of text interspersed
among them.

A distinctive technical convention used in the Genji Scrolls is the
removal of roofs from buildings to provide oblique views into their inte-
riors from above. Another is the drawing of faces with stylized “straight
lines for eyes and hooks for noses.” This elimination of facial expression
seems particularly fitting for the portrayal of members of a society that
so admired fixed, ideal types. Like the authors of much of Heian litera-
ture, the artists of the Genji Scrolls sought more to create a series of
moods than to depict particular individuals and particular situations (al-
though of course we know from the novel who the people are and what
they are doing).

Another fine emaki of the twelfth century is the Ban Dainagon Scroll,
which relates a complex political intrigue of 866 in which a certain Great
Councilor Ban was alleged to have caused the destruction by fire of one
of the principal gateways leading into the palace compound in Kyoto.
Completed about 1175, this work is of a different character from that of
the Genji Scrolls, In contrast to the static, stylized beauty of the latter, it
is full of action. Moreover, although set chiefly in Kyoto, the Ban Daina-
gon Scroll is crowded with people from both the upper and lower classes.
As we run our eyes from right to left, we see animated figures enacting
the continuous flow of narrative: the conspiracy that led to the burning
of the palace gateway, the chance discovery that Ban was involved in it,
and finally his banishment from the capital.

A particularly unusual set of early emaki are the Animal Scrolls trad-
tionally attributed to a Buddhist priest named Toba (1053-1140),
although stylistic analysis by scholars suggests that the scrolls were not
all painted by the same person and were in fact probably done over a
period of some hundred years from Toba’s time until the early thirteenth
century. The most artistically admirable sections of the scrolls show ani-
mals, including rabbits, monkeys, frogs, and foxes, frolicking and gam-
boling about (fig. 28). The animals are drawn with a marvelously sure
and skillful brush stroke and are the product of a technique of playful,
caricature-like artwork that can be traced back to certain charcoal
sketches done on the walls of the Horyuji Temple in the late seventh
century and to pictures found in the Shosoin storehouse of the Nara
period. The Animal Scrolls are also interesting from the standpoint of
social history, for they contain a number of scenes in which animals,
representing people, are shown satirizing contemporary life, particularly
the corrupt ways of some members of the Buddhist priesthood. One
especially blasphemous scene shows a monkey, garbed like a priest, pay-
ing ceremonial homage to a giant frog of a buddha who is seated on a
temporary outdoor altar (fig. 29).

Fig. 29 Scene from the Animal Scrolls (Benrido Company)

The Advent of a New Age

Emaki were produced during the next few centuries on a variety of
themes, including battles, the lives of famous priests, and the histories of
noted temples. One of the finest of these is the Tale of Heiji Scroll, which
deals with the conflict in 1159 (known as the Heiji Conflict) in which the
Ise Taira under Kiyomori vanquished their Minamoto rivals and began
their rise to power in Kyoto (fig. 30). The scroll is actually in three parts,
the first of which is a long, panoramic view of the Burning of the Sanjo
Palace, during which the Minamoto kidnaped the abdicated emperor Go-
shirakawa (1127-92) and precipitated the Heiji Conflict. This part of
the Heiji Scroll was obtained by the American Ernest Fenollosa (1853-
1 908) in the late nineteenth century and placed in the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts, where it remains today, one of the most treasured of Japanese
art works held outside Japan.

The Burning of the Sanjo Palace depicts, from right to left (all scrolls
are “read” from right to left), three scenes: (1) a great horde of people,
including warriors and others, rushing to the Palace; (2) Minamoto
wreaking destruction and havoc in the palace, from which smoke and
flames billow; and (3) Minamoto escorting the carriage of the abdicated
emperor from the palace. Although I speak here of three scenes, the
Burning of the Sanjo Palace is, in fact, presented as a single panorama.
The scroll's anonymous artist has brought the three separate scenes
together in a continuous flow by using the device, found in some scrolls,
of showing different moments of time as though they were occurring
simultaneously. By means of this device, a person can, for example, ap-
pear two or three times in the same panorama.

Stylistically, the Heiji Scroll— particularly its first part, the Burning of
the Sanjo Palace — shows the extraordinary skill of Japanese artists of the
time (it was painted in the thirteenth century) in capturing people, espe-
cially groups of people, in action. From the standpoint of military his-
tory, the Heiji Scroll is one of the earliest pictorial records we have of the
samurai, their mounts, armor, weapons, and methods of fighting.

There will be occasion in the next chapter to comment on one or two
more emaki as they appear in the development of medieval culture.

The Canons of Medieval Taste

The chieftain who emerged during the course of the Minamoto-Taira
War of 1180-85 as the supreme commander of Minamoto forces was
Yoritomo (1147-99). Unlike Kiyomori, the Taira leader who died in
1181, the second year of the war, Yoritomo deliberately avoided entangle-
ment in court politics in Kyoto. Instead, he remained at Kamakura, his
base in the Kanto, throughout the war, treating the pursuit and destruc-
tion of the Ise Taira as secondary to the establishment of control over the
eastern heartland of samurai society.

The government that Yoritomo founded at Kamakura is known in
English as the shogunate, after the title of shogun (“generalissimo”) that
the Minamoto chieftain received from the imperial court. Creation of this
exclusively military organization marked the beginning of the medieval
era of Japanese history, an era that lasted until the commencement of
early modern times at the end of the sixteenth century.

There is no question that the Kamakura shogunate represented a radi-
cally new form of government in Japan, situated far from the traditional
seat of courtier authority in the central provinces and staffed by warriors
who were related by feudal ties of personal loyalties. Yet the shogunate
was in no sense a rebel regime; on the contrary, it was founded and oper-
ated in an entirely “legitimate” fashion. Yoritomo, who remained ever
deferential in his formal dealings with the court, was careful to secure
imperial sanctification both for his own position and for the important
administrative acts of the new shogunate, such as the expansion of its
power to the national level through the appointment of Minamoto vassals
as land stewards and constables to estates and provinces throughout the
country.

The fighting between Taira and Minamoto that led to defeat of the
former and ushered in the medieval era (the first part of which, 1185-
1333, is also designated the Kamakura period) is most vividly retold in
The Tale of the Heike. But there is another book, written in the early thir-
teenth century by Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216), a former courtier
turned religious recluse, that is also an important literary account of this
pivotal epoch in Japanese history. Chomei’s work, the Hojoki (An Account

The Canons of Medieval Taste

of a Ten-foot-square Hut), is a brief miscellany written in essentially the
same style of classical Japanese as The Tale of the Heike . Like the Heike, it
has a famous opening passage, which speaks about the insubstantiality of
life and about a world that is ever in flux:

The flow of the river is ceaseless and its water is never the same. The bubbles
that float in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, are not of long duration:
so in the world are man and his dwellings. It might be imagined that the
houses, great and small, which vie roof against proud roof in the capital
remain unchanged from one generation to the next, but when we examine
whether this is true, how few are the houses that were there of old. Some
were burnt last year and only since rebuilt; great houses have crumbled into
hovels and those who dwell in them have fallen no less. The city is the same,
the people are as numerous as ever, but of those I used to know, a bare one or
two in twenty remain. They die in the morning, they are born in the evening,
like foam on the water.1

Yet, unlike the Heike , the Hojoki makes no direct mention of the
struggle between Taira and Minamoto waged in the early 1 1 80s but in-
stead describes the series of disasters — some natural, others induced by
the war — that struck the capital during these years. (Among the disasters
were fire, whirlwind, famine, and earthquake.) The Hojoki also presents
in Buddhist terms a pessimistic view of this existence as a place of foul-
ness and suffering that is perhaps even more emphatic than the one given
in the Heike. The phrase “ten-foot-square hut” refers to the exceedingly
modest dwelling on a mountain outside the capital that Chomei finally
constructs for his home in the effort to renounce all worldly attachments
and thus prepare himself for entry into Amida’s Pure Land paradise upon
death. In the end, however, he sadly admits that he has failed to find
complete release from earthly things and, in fact, has become attached
even to his little hut. As William La Fleur has discussed, the hut recurs
throughout the Hojoki as a carefully crafted metaphor for the Buddhist
idea of impermanence and, indeed, for life itself, which, in all its aspects,
is fleeting and uncertain.2

The recluse retiring to a hut in the wilderness or away from areas of
human habitation is a familiar figure in Chinese history, literature, and
art, found most conspicuously perhaps in the guise of the Taoist who
leaves society and seeks to become one with nature. Recluses and huts
also appear in earlier Japanese literature, but it was the Hojoki that
established them — especially the hut — as medieval ideals. For Kamo no
Chomei, the construction of a hut of absolute minimum size and quality
represented his rejection of materialism to make himself ready, as just
noted, for Amida’s Pure Land paradise. But even in Chomei we can ob-
serve a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into
something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be
discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times. How

The Canons of Medieval Taste

Chomei the poet aestheticized his hut, perhaps unconsciously, can be
observed in the following partial description of it from the Hdjdki :

I laid a foundation and roughly thatched roof. I fastened hinges to the joints
of the beams, the easier to move elsewhere should anything displease
me. . . . Since first I hid my traces here in the heart of Mount Hino, I have
added a lean-to on the south and a porch of bamboo. On the west I have built
a shelf for holy water, and inside the hut, along the west wall, I have installed
an image of Amida. . . . Above the sliding door that faces north I have built a
little shelf on which I keep three or four black leather baskets that contain
books of poetry and music and extracts from the sacred writings. Beside
them stand a folding koto and a lute.

Along the east wall I have spread long fern fronds and mats of straw,
which serve as my bed for the night. I have cut open a window in the eastern
wall, and beneath it have made a desk. Near my pillow is a square brazier in
which I burn brushwood. To the north of the hut I have staked out a small
plot of land that I have enclosed with a rough fence and made into a garden.
I grow many species of herbs there.3

The medieval ideal of the hut reached its climax, spiritually and aes-
thetically, in the tea ceremony, which was created, as we will see, prima-
rily in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Under the influence of Bud-
dhism (especially Zen Buddhism), the tea master built his teahouse on
the model of the peasant hut. And even when the teahouse/hut was situ-
ated in a city, such as Kyoto or Nara, it was styled as though — and pro-
vided with natural surroundings to give the impression that — it was in a
remote “mountain village” (yamazato). The tea master assumed the role
of one who has withdrawn from the world and, in a minimalist structure
far from the bustle of urban society, seeks to achieve spiritual tranquility,
if not enlightenment, through the enjoyment of tea. Inasmuch as the tea
ceremony was as thoroughly aesthetic as it was spiritual, the master’s hut
became, in its arrangement and appointments, the principal manifesta-
tion of his conception of “deprived beauty.”

An event during the war that was especially shocking to contempo-
raries was the wanton destruction by the Taira of the Todaiji Temple in
Nara. The Todaiji, it will be recalled, had been constructed under impe-
rial auspices in the mid-eighth century to serve as one of the principal
symbols of centralized court rule in Japan. Its loss must have struck many
as an irrefutable sign that the country had come to final disaster in the
age of mappo . Yet, tragic though it was, the burning of the Todaiji actu-
ally stimulated a minor renaissance in the art of the Nara period.

This renaissance came about when, shortly after the end of hostilities
between the Taira and Minamoto in 1 185, a drive was undertaken to raise
funds for rebuilding the Todaiji. Generous contributions were acquired
from members of both the courtier and warrior elites, including the
new ruler of Kamakura, Yoritomo. Before long, Nara was bustling with

The Canons of Medieval Taste

activity, as work was begun at the sites of both the Todaiji and the
Kofukuji, another major temple devastated by the Taira. Jobs were made
available to artists and craftsmen, and new attention was focused on the
former seat of imperial rule and its art treasures.

The Nara renaissance of the late twelfth century gave particular
opportunity for fame to a group of scholars known as the “kei” school
(from the fact that its members all used “kei” in their assumed names).
The most distinguished member of this school was Unkei (dates un-
known), whose familiarity with the Tempyo art of his native Nara is evi-
dent in such realistic pieces as the statues in wood at the Kofukuji of two
historical personages of Indian Buddhism. Stylistically, the statues are
reminiscent of the dry lacquer image, noted in Chapter 2, of the blind
priest Ganjin, who emigrated from China in the eighth century to found
one of the “six sects” of Nara Buddhism.

Although not a member of the warrior class, Unkei has been called a
samurai sculptor because most of his surviving works seem to be imbued
with the vigor and strength of the new military age. No doubt these gen-
eral qualities of vigor and strength, so different ffom the softness and even
femininity of Fujiwara art, derived at least in part ffom Unkei’s familiarity
with the styles of other, earlier art epochs, including Jogan (early Heian)
as well as Tempyo. Yet, in the minds of many critics, Unkei was also
deeply influenced as an artist by his exposure to warrior life in Kama-
kura, which he visited to do work on commission for high officers of the
shogunate. Hence, one may well choose to regard as “samurai pieces”
such realistically detailed and dynamically postured statues as the two
guardian deities at the Todaiji (attributed to Unkei and another member
of his school, Kaikei [dates unknown]).

Despite the achievements of Unkei, his colleagues, and some of his
successors, sculpture — and especially religious sculpture — declined stead-
ily during the Kamakura period and never again became a major art in
Japan. Probably the chief reason for this was that some medieval sects of
Buddhism strongly de-emphasized iconography and the use of art for
strictly religious purposes.

Like Buddhist sculpture, Buddhist painting also steadily gave ground
to secular art in medieval times. One of the most significant develop-
ments in painting was in the field of realistic portraiture. So far as we
know, Heian artists had made no attempt to depict the actual likenesses
of real people. Some scholars suggest that this was largely because the
deeply superstitious courtiers feared that portraits might be used for the
casting of evil spells. In any case, it was not until about the time of the
struggles between the Taira and the Minamoto that the earliest portraits
were done. Among the best known is one of Yoritomo by an artist of the
Fujiwara clan.

The founding of the Kamakura shogunate did not cause the immediate

The Canons of Medieval Taste

fossilization of the imperial court as a governing body. Indeed, the court
retained certain residual powers for at least another century and a half
(for example, it continued to appoint governors who operated side by
side in the provinces with the military constables); and when the shogun-
ate was overthrown in 1333, an emperor even attempted to restore the
throne to a position of absolute rulership in the country.

But the trend during the medieval age was inexorably toward the im-
position of feudal control at every level of society. And from the outset
of the age we find a despairing awareness among the courtiers that their
days of splendor as a ruling elite could never be revived. Increasingly de-
prived of political power, the courtiers became ever more covetous of
their role as the custodians of traditional culture. This can perhaps best
be seen in the realm of poetry, long the most esteemed of the gentle pur-
suits. Some skill in waka versification had of course been mandatory for
members of the courtier class throughout most of the Heian period. In
the medieval age, it became a way of life for its chief practitioners, who
formed exclusive cliques and entered into fierce rivalries over issues in-
volving minute differences in style, choice of words, and appropriate
poetic topics.

Needless to say, medieval poets never used zvaka to describe the fight-
ing and disorder that accompanied the rise of the samurai to power. But
the sentiments they sought to express were nevertheless far darker and
more deeply moving than those of their predecessors a century or so
earlier. Here, for example, are two poems from the Shinkokinshu (New
Kokinshu ), compiled about 1205 and usually regarded as the last of the
great imperially authorized anthologies.

In a tree standing
Beside a desolate field.

The voice of a dove
Calling to its companions —

Lonely, terrible evening.

Even to someone

Free of passions this sadness

Would be apparent:

Evening in autumn over
A marsh where a snipe rises.4

These two poems are by Saigyo (11 18-90), a leading contributor to
the Shinkokinshu and, in the minds of many, one of the finest poets in
Japanese history. A man of warrior background who became a Buddhist
priest, Saigyo is perhaps best remembered as the first of the great travel-
ing poets. During the Heian period, few among the upper levels of Kyoto
society aspired to travel into the provinces, and such travel was usually
undertaken only when unavoidable. But with the coming of the medieval

The Canons of Medieval Taste

age there was a reaction against the overly urban-centered culture of
Heian times, and poets and other men of the arts like Saigyo, not con-
tent with just imagining what the famous sites looked like, set off on
journeys to see them with their own eyes. It also became customary for
people of this sort to take Buddhist vows and become priestlike inja or
“those who have withdrawn from society.”

In this way a tradition of travel became associated with the arts in
medieval times. Poets like Saigyo and the fifteenth-century linked-verse
master Sogi (1421-1502) became particularly renowned as travelers; but
there were others, such as the painter Sesshu (1420-1506), a contempo-
rary of Sogi, whose art was also greatly enriched by travel. To the medi-
eval Japanese, traveling symbolized the Buddhist sense of impermanence
(mujo) that was felt so deeply during this age; and travelers, conceived as
men who leave society behind to wander to distant, lonely places, were
thought to experience more fully the true nature of life itself.

In the second of the two poems above by Saigyo, we are informed of
the poignant fact that even a person “free of passions” (that is, one who
has taken Buddhist vows and renounced worldly feelings) experiences
sadness when he views a bleak autumn scene at evening as a solitary snipe
rises from a marsh. The word translated as sadness is aware , which, as
we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In
the period of the Shinkokinshu , when Saigyo lived, this sentiment was
particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by
association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of lone-
liness; but, however painful the awareness of that might be, the medieval
Japanese were able to realize some consolation in the beauty of sabi ,
which they found in such things as a desolate field or a monochromatic,
withered marsh.

The poets of the Kamakura period, as implied in the title New Kokin -
shu, were inclined more and more to look to the past for inspiration. They
admired particularly the poems of the tenth-century anthology Kokinshu,
but were also influenced to a greater degree than before by the monu-
mental Man ’yds hit of the Nara period. We observed that the Man’ydshu ,
written by means of a complex use of Chinese characters to reproduce
the sounds of Japanese, was excessively recondite for the Heian period
courtiers. It is estimated that before the medieval age only a few hun-
dred of its more than 4,500 poems could be fully understood.5 But with
the renewal of scholarship in Japan in late Heian times, there was a
revival of interest in and study of the Man’ydshu; and during the thir-
teenth century, a Tendai priest named Senkaku (1203-?) produced the
first complete Man’ydshu commentary.

A principal compiler of the Shinkokinshu and, along with Saigyo, one
of the most distinguished poets of the age was Fujiwara Teika (1162-
1241). Of all the courtiers of the early Kamakura period, Teika is the
best known for his desire to escape from reality into the realm of art.

The Canons of Medieval Taste

Upon hearing of Minamoto Yoritomo’s rising against the Taira in 1180,
for example, Teika noted in his diary that, although his ears were assailed
by news of military rebellion and chastisement, such events were of no
concern to him. The only thing he wished to do was to compose
supremely beautiful zvaka .

In at least one respect, Teika was a product of his age: he was an out-
standing scholar as well as poet. Moreover, he was instrumental in set-
ting forth and applying the aesthetic principles that were largely to dic-
tate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi.
Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yugen , which
can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let us first examine the
“depth” element of yugen as it was conceived by Teika and the other Shin-
kokinshu poets.

One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition — along with
such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity — is suggestion.
The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the
subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristi-
cally sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojo ). In
the period of the Shinkokinshu , the idea of creating resonances or depth
of poetic expression through suggestion was praised to the point of mak-
ing it virtually the supreme consideration of the poet. The thirty-one-
syllable zvaka form of poetry was thus extolled precisely because its
brevity demanded resonances and the quality of depth. This sentiment
was beautifully articulated by the priest Shun’e (fl. ca. 1 160-80):

It is only when many meanings are compressed into a single word, when the
depths of feelings are exhausted yet not expressed, when an unseen world
hovers in the atmosphere of the poem, when the mean and common are used
to express the elegant, when a poetic conception of rare beauty is developed
to the fullest extent in a style of surface simplicity — only then, when the con-
ception is exalted to the highest degree and “the words are too few,” will the
poem, by expressing one’s feelings in this way, have the power of moving
Heaven and Earth within the brief confines of thirty-one syllables and be
capable of softening the hearts of gods and demons.6

In addition to his remarks about the power of words that are “too few,”
Shun'e makes reference to “an unseen world [that] hovers in the atmo-
sphere of [a] poem.” It is this unseen world or sense of atmosphere that
constitutes the second element of yugen : mystery. The following poem
by Fujiwara Teika well illustrates both the mystery and depth of yugen.

When the floating bridge
Of the dream of a spring night
Was snapped, I woke:

In the sky a bank of clouds
Was drawing away from the peak.7

The Canons of Medieval Taste

In Japanese poetry the dream is often used to create the atmospheric
(mysterious) quality of Shun’e’s unseen world; and, in this particular
poem, strong resonances are brought into play by the words “floating
bridge” and “dream,” which allude to the last chapter of The Tale of Genji ,
“The Floating Bridge of Dreams,” and thus conjure up the brilliant world
of romance, love, and beauty that the Genji exemplified in the tradition
of courtly culture.

While certain courtiers like Teika attempted to evade the realities of the
new age by devoting themselves single-mindedly to the traditional arts,
other individuals were drawn into the great movements of religious con-
version that occurred in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There
had been a scattering of evangelists from at least the eighth century in
Japan who had traveled into the provinces bearing the gospel and help-
ing with the building of bridges, the digging of wells, and other public
works. In the Heian period the priest Kuya (903-72) became especially
famous as a popularizer of Amidism. He danced through the streets and
sang songs such as this:

He never fails

To reach the Lotus Land of Bliss
Who calls,

If only once,

The name of Amida.8

But not until the Kamakura period was Buddhism Finally carried to all
corners of the country.

Amidism had appealed to the Heian courtiers in part because of the
opportunity it gave them to reproduce in literature and art the blisses of
the pure land and the joy of Amida’s descent to greet those about to
enter it. Yet the nembutsu , or invocation of Amida’s name, had simply
been one of a number of practices followed by the doctrinally catholic
adherents of Tendai Buddhism; and Amidism was not established as a
separate sect until the time of the evangelist Honen (1133-1212).

Like all the great religious leaders of the Kamakura period, Honen
received his early priestly training at the Tendai center on Mount Hiei.
He found himself, however, increasingly dissatisfied with the older Bud-
dhist methods of seeking enlightenment or salvation through individual,
merit-producing acts, and came to stress utter reliance upon and faith in
Amida as the only one able to save men in the corrupt age of mappo . Yet,
in actual practice, Honen did not insist upon absolute faith in Amida’s
saving grace.

One of the most fundamental doctrinal problems in Pure Land Bud-
dhism was whether the nembutsu — the calling upon Amida to be saved —
should be recited once or many times. Since, theoretically, Amida had
vowed to save all those who acknowledged their own helplessness and

The Canons of Medieval Taste

who threw themselves upon his infinite mercy, one recitation should have
sufficed. But there was an apparently natural tendency for some people
to believe that they could make their salvation more certain or even
achieve a “better salvation” if they repeated the nembutsu over and over.
The individual who was thus motivated to recite the nembutsu continu-
ously was, of course, either consciously or unconsciously guilty of a cer-
tain lack of trust in Amida, since he felt the need to bolster his faith
through added personal effort. Moreover, if repetition of the nembutsu
was indeed helpful in the quest for salvation, then those with the greater
leisure to practice it would have the best chance to be saved.

It was Honen’s disciple, Shinran (1173-1262), who finally resolved
this problem by asserting that Amida promised salvation unconditionally
to all who sincerely called upon him once, whether or not they actually
pronounced the nembutsu aloud. With salvation assured by this single act,
the individual was free to recite the nembutsu as often as he wished, but
such recitation would then be simply an expression of thanksgiving to
Amida, and would in no way modify the already given promise of rebirth
in the pure land.

Shinran spent many years in the provinces, especially the Kanto,
where he preached his message of salvation through unquestioning faith
in Amida. He had particular success as a proselytizer among the peas-
antry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True
Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has
attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its
founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most orig-
inal religious thinkers.

Another evangelist of Pure Land Buddhism, active in the late thir-
teenth century, was Ippen (1239-89), who urged the practice of the
“circulating nembutsu ” or chanting of praise to Amida with and among
people everywhere. Although Ippen cannot be ranked in importance with
Honen and Shinran in the history of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan, he
has been immortalized in one of the finest of all medieval emaki : the
Scroll of Saint Ippen, painted approximately ten years after the evange-
list’s death.

This scroll is a narrative record of Ippen’s travels throughout the
country, during the course of which he purportedly gathered the astound-
ing total of some 2.5 million converts to his sect of Amidism. The Ippen
Scroll is not only a work of art, it is also an invaluable document of thir-
teenth-century social history. Artistically, the scroll is perhaps most ad-
mired for its landscape background, which, although purely Japanese in
subject matter, is executed in a style that shows the strong influence of
Sung China. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as we shall see, Sung
painting served as the inspiration for a distinguished line of landscape
artists in Japan.

As a social document, the Ippen Scroll contains scenes of virtually

100

The Canons of Medieval Taste

every major aspect of life and social activity in the Kamakura period, in-
cluding people at work and play in the countryside and towns and gath-
ered to meet Ippen at Shinto shrines, Buddhist temples, and the private
homes of the well-to-do. In one particularly lively scene from the scroll,
Ippen is shown leading a group of followers in the ecstatic practice of
the “dancing nembutsu that is, the singing of praise to Amida while
dancing and tapping small hand-drums. The dancers are tightly crowded
into a small frame structure, elegant carriages are clustered about on the
street outside, and highborn ladies can be seen mingling with the towns-
people.

Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who
most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith
was Nichiren (1222-82). One of the most exceptional and interesting
figures in Japanese history, Nichiren founded the only major sect of Bud-
dhism in Japan that did not derive directly from a religious institution
already established in China. The chief factor in determining the nature
of Nichiren Buddhism was Nichiren ’s own extraordinary personality. But,
in order to understand how and why the sect arose in the mid-thirteenth
century, it is essential also to note the particular political and social con-
ditions under which Nichiren grew to maturity.

When the great founder of the Kamakura shogunate, Minamoto Yori-
tomo, died in 1 199, he was succeeded as shogun by a young and ineffec-
tual son. A power struggle soon arose among the leading vassals of the
Minamoto, and in the early years of the thirteenth century the Hojo
family, related by marriage to Yoritomo,g emerged as the new de facto
rulers of the shogunate. But the Hojo chieftain, in characteristic Japanese
fashion, sought to avoid being stigmatized as a mere power seeker by
assuming the rather modest-sounding title of shogunal regent and by
designating an infant of the courtier clan of Fujiwara to occupy the high,
but now politically impotent, office of shogun.10

While the Hojo were consolidating their position at Kamakura, a cer-
tain former emperor in Kyoto organized a plot to overthrow the shogun-
ate, which seemed so torn with internal strife after Yoritomo’s death. In
1221 the former emperor branded the Hojo regent a rebel and called
upon people everywhere to rise and destroy the shogunate. But the
Hojo, acting decisively, sent an army to Kyoto that swiftly overran the
former emperor’s poorly organized troops.11

This brief clash of arms was a great blow to the ancien regime in
Kyoto, even though many members of the courtier class had refused to
join the former emperor’s cause. As victors, the Hojo were able to con-
fiscate thousands of additional estate holdings for distribution among
their samurai followers and to appoint many new military officials
throughout the country. Moreover, the Hojo from this time on not only
dictated to a far greater degree than before the conduct of affairs at

The Canons of Medieval Taste

101

court, but even assumed the right to decide the line of succession to
the throne.

Nichiren was born in a fishing village in the Kanto the year after the
former emperor’s disastrously unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the
Hojo. He went through his formative years in an age when the fortunes
of the imperial court and those institutions that supported it, including
the Tendai and Shingon churches, were far lower than they had been
during the youth of Honen or even of Shinran. Nichiren appears, more-
over, to have been more profoundly affected by the concept of mappo
than probably any other religious leader of the Kamakura period. After a
number of years of study at the Tendai center on Mount Hiei and else-
where, he formed an apocalyptic view of the deterioration of Japan from
within and its destruction from without. An exceptionally large number
of natural disasters appeared during the mid-thirteenth century to con-
firm his prediction of internal deterioration; and the two attempts of
the Mongols to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281, although unsuccessful,
seemed to be chilling portents that the country might indeed be over-
whelmed by forces from outside its borders.

Nichiren asserted in loudly militant and shockingly intemperate lan-
guage that Japan was suffering such agonies because of the false doc-
trines of other Buddhist sects and the vile ways of those who propagated
them. Thus, for example, he labeled Kukai “the greatest liar in Japan”
and the adherents to Shingon, Kukai’s sect, “traitors.” He regarded Zen
as “a doctrine of fiends and devils”; he called the followers of Ritsu, one
of the Nara-period sects, “brigands”; and he considered the nembutsu “a
hellish practice.”12 When asked by the Hojo regent how Japan might
defend against the pending Mongol invasion (the first invasion), Nichiren
replied that the shogunate should crush the other Buddhist sects, inas-
much as they had weakened and corrupted Japan to the point that it was
vulnerable to invasion. Upon hearing later that Mongol envoys to Japan
had been executed, Nichiren said: “It is a great pity that they should
have cut off the heads of the innocent Mongols and left unharmed the
priests of the nembutsu , Shingon, Zen, and Ritsu, who are the enemies of
Japan.”13

Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus
Sutra , the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which
Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddha-
hood. At the time of its founding in Japan by Saicho in the early ninth
century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra;
but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’ s
teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land
Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these
teachings.

As a result of his virulent attacks on the other sects of Buddhism and

102

The Canons of Aiedieval Taste

his criticism of the conduct of national affairs, Nichiren was often in
trouble with the shogunate authorities, was in fact twice exiled from
Kamakura, and was even sentenced to death. Still, he continued to in-
sist that salvation for mankind and for Japan could only be achieved
through absolute faith in the Lotus Sutra . He preached that, for the indi-
vidual, there was no need to attempt to read and understand the Sutra;
buddhahood was attainable simply through recitation of the formula,
reminiscent of the nembutsu, of “Praise to the Wonderful Law of the
Lotus Sutra . ”

Nichiren’s name is written with the characters for “sun” and “lotus.”
Lotus, of course, represents the Lotus Sutray whereas sun stands for
Japan. Nichiren came to envision that, when the age of mappo reached
its cataclysmic end (which he believed was very near), a great new Bud-
dhist era would commence in which Japan would become the central
Buddhist see in the world and in which he, Nichiren, would play a
founding role in religious history similar to that of Gautama.

This kind of Japan-centered millennial thinking has led a number of
commentators to claim that Nichiren was the first nationalist in Japa-
nese history. Although “nationalist” is probably too modern a term to
apply to a person of the thirteenth century, Nichiren certainly had a
consciousness of country that set him apart from the other Buddhist
leaders of the age. Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the
nation, and the vessel of the country,” u Nichiren seems even to have
equated himself with Japan and its fate.

The last of the so-called new sects of Kamakura Buddhism was Zen,
which like Amidism had long been known to the Japanese but was not
established independently in Japan until the early medieval age. Zen
means “meditation,” and meditation — particularly in the cross-legged
yogic position — is one of the most fundamental practices in Buddhism.
Gautama, in fact, is purported to have achieved his own enlightenment
while in a deep meditative state. In Zen, enlightenment (satori) may be
interpreted as the final realization that a person's suffering stems from
the striving for such things as wealth and power that appear to be real,
but actually are illusory. Unlike the Salvationist sects of Pure Land and
Nichiren Buddhism, which called upon the individual to escape from
suffering by placing faith completely in some other being or thing
(Amida or the Lotus Swrra), Zen encouraged the seeking of personal en-
lightenment— that is, the realization of one’s buddha nature— through
discipline and effort.

Tradition has it that Zen, which is pronounced Ch’an in Chinese, was
first introduced to China from India in the sixth century by a priest
named Bodhidharma. We are told that when Bodhidharma met the Chi-
nese Emperor Wu, this conversation occurred:

The Canons of Medieval Taste

103

Emperor Wu :

Bodhidharma:
Emperor Wu:
Bodhidharma:
Emperor Wu:
Bodhidharma:

“Since my enthronement I have built many monas-
teries, had many scriptures copied, and had many
monks and nuns invested. How great is the merit thus
achieved?”

“No merit at all.”

“What is the Noble Truth in its highest sense?”

“It is empty, no nobility whatever.”

“Who is it then that is facing me?”

“I do not know sire.”15

We are further told that Bodhidharma later sat facing a wall in medita-
tion for nine years. To prevent himself from sleeping, he cut off his eye-
lids; and from the long, uninterrupted sitting, his legs withered and fell
off. We see Bodhidharma today in Japan in the popular Daruma doll
with its legless, oval shape and huge, staring eyes.

Emperor Wu understandably regarded Bodhidharma’s responses to
his questions as nonsensical, presumably not realizing that, in fact, they
expressed the essence of Zen. In Zen, enlightenment is sought by dispel-
ling delusion, and that which deludes people most is language. Described
as “a special transmission outside the scriptures,” Zen rejects — or at least
seeks to hold to a minimum — the use of words, both spoken and written.
It stresses instead the intuitive, calling for “use of the heart (or mind) to
transmit the heart (or mind)” and for “direct pointing to the soul of
man.” Bodhidharma’s apparently nonsensical responses to Emperor Wu’s
questions can be taken to mean that there is no rationally meaningful
answer to anything. Like Bodhidharma, a later Zen master was thus likely
to reply to an inquiry from a disciple about, say, the nature of satori or
enlightenment with a phrase such as “Three pounds of flax!” or “Go
wash your bowl!”

From such exchanges as the above between master and disciple, there
developed the device of the koan or problem presented to the disciple in
the form of a question that cannot be rationally or logically answered
and is intended to force the disciple to find an “answer” in some other
way. In time a series of koan and what were considered their correct
answers were worked out to provide uniform training. Here are two koan
and their answers:

Q: “In what way do my feet resemble the feet of a donkey?”

A: “When the heron stands in the snow, its color is not the same.”

Q: “Everyone has a native place owing to his karma. Where is your
native place?”

104

The Canons of Medieval Taste

A: “Early in the morning I ate white rice gruel; now I feel hungry
again.”16

The koan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect
of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment”
because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual
in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect
of Zen, Soto, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds
that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated
meditation.

Because of its stress on self-discipline and control, Zen seemed partic-
ularly appropriate as a creed for the warriors of medieval Japan, and
eventually it did exert a strong influence on the molding of the samurai
way of life. But there is danger in overestimating the degree to which Zen
was embraced as a religion by the medieval samurai. For all its anti-intel-
lectual claims to simplicity and directness of communication, Zen was
more attractive to the sophisticated than to the uncultivated mind. The
vast majority of medieval samurai were rough, unlettered men engaged in
a brutal profession, and they sought their religious solace chiefly in the
Salvationist sects. Zen appealed primarily to the ruling members of samu-
rai society.

The influence of Zen spread far beyond the realm of religion in medi-
eval times; indeed, it can be argued that its principal role was not in reli-
gion but in aesthetics and the arts. In China during the Sung period, Zen
(Ch’an) priests had become prominent figures in literature, painting, and
the other arts, even though such activity was contradictory to their reli-
gious beliefs, especially the conviction that language is the main cause of
delusion. In any case, the Zen that was brought to Japan in its medieval
age became the carrier for a new wave of borrowing from China that in-
cluded poetry and prose in Chinese and painting in the Sung monochro-
matic ink style (sumi-e). In addition, Zen priests imported many works of
art and calligraphy as well as articles of craft, such as ceramics and lac-
querware. Medieval Zen priests also became the main agents, as we will
see in Chapter 7, for transmission of the tenets of Neo-Confucianism,
which had been developing in China throughout the Sung period.

The Hojo regents were particularly enthusiastic patrons of Zen and
sought to make Kamakura its center as part of a larger effort to elevate
the cultural life of the new military capital. One way in w^hich the Hojo
promoted Zen was by welcoming to Kamakura prominent Zen (Ch’an)
priests wrho fled China as it came under the control of invading Mongols
in the thirteenth century (the Sung dynasty was finally overthrown by
the Mongols in 1279). These Chinese priests became the leaders of the
Zen establishment in Kamakura and served as the founding abbots of

The Canons of Medieval Taste

105

such great Zen temples as Kenchoji and Engakuji. In the fourteenth cen-
tury, when the Kamakura shogunate was destroyed and the seat of mili-
tary power was shifted to Kyoto upon the founding of the Ashikaga or
Muromachi shogunate (1336-1573), Kyoto superseded Kamakura as the
country’s Zen center. But the Kamakura period remained the time when
Zen, emanating from Kamakura, was probably propagated in its purest
form. Once Kyoto became its principal home, Zen was strongly influ-
enced by the older Buddhist traditions of the imperial capital, especially
Shingon.

On the whole, the Hojo regents exercised firm and just rule over
samurai society through most of the thirteenth century. Unlike Mina-
moto Yoritomo, who had governed in a highly autocratic way, the Hojo
opened a Council of State to enable chieftains of the other great samurai
families of the east to participate in the decision making of the shogun-
ate. Moreover, the Hojo based their rule on an epochal formulary, the
Joei Code of 1232, which contained detailed provisions dealing with
those matters that were of most concern to the members of a warrior
class, including the duties of land stewards and constables, the distribu-
tion of fiefs, and the settlement of armed disputes.

Even while the Hojo were thus placing the shogunate on a firm insti-
tutional basis, events were occurring on the continent that were to present
Japan with its only major foreign threat in premodern historical times.
In the early thirteenth century, the Mongols under Chingghis Khan
assembled one of the greatest empires in the history of the world, con-
quering North China and extending their territorial control across Asia
and into eastern Europe. After Chingghis’s death, the Chinese portion
of his empire was inherited by his grandson Khubilai Khan. It took
Khubilai until 1279 to destroy the Southern Sung and to unite all of
China under the Yuan or “Original” dynasty (1270-1368). But even
before this final achievement, Khubilai sought to bring Japan into a sub-
servient, tributary relationship. The other countries of East Asia had
long accepted as a matter of course such a relationship with the mighty
Middle Kingdom of China, but the Japanese from at least the time of
Prince Shotoku in the early seventh century had steadfastly resisted being
drawn into it.

When the Japanese steadfastly refused to submit — indeed, even to
respond — to Khubilai’s imperious and threatening demands, the Mongol
leader launched two great armadas against them in 1274 and 1281. In
the first invasion the Mongol force numbered some 90,000, and in the
second nearly 140,000. Both invasions took place in northern Kyushu,
which was defended by the samurai of that westernmost island, and both
failed — the first after only one day and the second after nearly two months

106

The Canons of Medieval Taste

— because of typhoons that forced the Mongols back onto their ships,
out to open water, and subsequently, after severe losses (especially during
the storm of 1281), back to the continent.17

In the second invasion, the Kyushu samurai were better able to defend
themselves because they had built a protective stone wall (about three
meters high) around Hakata Bay, where the Mongols had landed in the
first invasion and were likely to try to land in the second, and because
they had prepared a fleet of small boats that they sent out to harass and,
in some cases, even board the larger Mongol troop ships. But in the first
invasion the discrepancy in fighting methods and power in favor of the
Mongols was such that the Japanese would probably have been decisively
defeated if a storm had not fortuitously blown up on the very first — and,
as a result, only — day of the invasion.

The samurai were accustomed to firing signal arrows to announce the
commencement of battle and then to pairing off to fight one against one,
all the while shouting out their names and pedigrees. Here, according to
a Japanese source, is how the Mongols responded to this style of fighting
during the first invasion:

The Mongols disembarked, mounted their horses, raised their banners, and
began to attack. . . . [One Japanese] . . . shot a whistling arrow to open the
exchange. All at once the Mongols down to the last man started laughing.
The Mongols struck large drums and hit gongs so many times . . . that they
frightened the Japanese horses and they could not be controlled. The Japa-
nese forgot about handling their horses and facing the enemy. . . . [The Mon-
gol] general climbed to a high spot and, when retreat was in order, beat the
retreat drum. When they needed to race forward, he rang the attack gong.
According to these signals, they did battle. . . . Whereas we [Japanese] thought
about reciting our pedigrees to each other and battling man to man in glory
or defeat as was the custom of Japanese armies, in this battle the Mongols
assembled at one point in a great force.18

Not only were the Mongols better organized for battle, operating in
units and using drums and gongs for signaling, they also employed
weapons, including catapults, exploding balls, and poisoned arrows, that
were entirely new to the Japanese. The samurai horses, as mentioned in
the above passage, were especially frightened by the drums, gongs, and
exploding balls. The exploding balls, we may note, provided the Japa-
nese with their first exposure to the use of gunpowder, which had been
invented in China.

The colossal force of 1 40,000 in the second invasion, although it over-
ran several islands, was never able to make a significant landing on
Kyushu proper. A major reason for this failure was the lack of coordina-
tion between the two units of the Mongol force, one of which set sail
from southern Korea and the other from Ningpo in south China; an-
other was the stone wall the Japanese built around Hataka Bay; and still

The Canons of Medieval Taste

107

another was the effectiveness of the samurai counterattacks in small boats.
Remnants of the stone wall can still be found at Hakata, and we have a
splendid representation of it as well as other features of and scenes from
the invasions in the famous Mongol Scroll, painted in the late thirteenth
century, shortly after the invasions.

One of the most interesting things we learn from the Mongol Scroll is
that the Mongols fought mainly on foot: only their commanders appear
on horseback in the scroll. Although I speak of the “Mongols,” the in-
vading forces also included many Chinese and Koreans. In any case, the
image of these invaders presented in the Mongol Scroll is very different
from the one we have of the Mongol armies, formed primarily into units
of light cavalry, that conquered much of Asia — and even parts of eastern
Europe and the Middle East — during the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries.

In the end, it appears to have been the typhoons that defeated the
Mongols. To the Japanese, these typhoons were not mere accidents of
nature but rather kamikaze or “divine winds” sent by the gods to save
their country in its hour of greatest peril. Belief in kamikaze was part of
a great Shinto revival during the Kamakura period, one of the principal
claims of which was that the true defenders of Japan were the karni of
Shinto rather than the deities of Buddhism, as had been maintained by
Buddhists for centuries. In later times, the kamikaze concept exerted a
powerful influence on the Japanese myth — finally shattered in World War
II — of national invincibility.

The Mongol threat was an important, but not sole, cause for the de-
cline of the Kamakura shogunate in the late thirteenth and early four-
teenth centuries. Another was the emergence in various regions of the
country of new warrior bands that the shogunate, organized originally as
a military hegemony over the eastern provinces, found increasingly diffi-
cult to control. Still another was a succession dispute that erupted be-
tween two branches of the imperial family about the time of the invasions.

This dispute appeared at first to be of little significance, since the
Hojo had stripped the imperial family of nearly all political power a half-
century earlier; and an agreement by which the so-called senior and
junior branches of the family alternately provided candidates for the em-
perorship worked tolerably well for a number of years. Then, in 1318,
Godaigo (1288-1339), a most forceful and headstrong member of the
junior branch, ascended the throne and determined not only to transmit
the line of succession exclusively to his own descendants but also to
restore the throne to real power.

Godaigo ’s restorationist or loyalist movement was successful in 1333
when the forces that rallied to him, including both courtiers and samurai,
overthrew the Kamakura shogunate and gave the emperor the opportu-
nity to rule, as well as reign, that he had long sought. But the Restora-

108

The Canons of Medieval Taste

tion of Godaigo lasted a scant three years and was a generally reaction-
ary and impractical attempt to turn the course of history back to the
early Heian period, before power was first taken from the throne by the
Fujiwara regents.

Totally unable to meet the real governing needs of the medieval age,
the Restoration regime was overthrown in 1336 by Ashikaga Takauji
(1305-58), the chieftain of a main branch of the great Minamoto clan.
After driving Godaigo and his remnant supporters to refuge in the moun-
tainous region of Yoshino to the south, Takauji placed a member of the
senior branch of the imperial family on the throne and established a new
military administration in Kyoto, known in history as the Ashikaga or
Muromachi shogunate (1336-1573). The first half-century of Muro-
machi times, 1 336 to 1 392, is also designated the epoch of the Northern
and Southern Courts, inasmuch as Godaigo and his successors main-
tained an opposition Southern Court at Yoshino during this period that
challenged the legitimacy of what it regarded as the puppet Northern
Court of the Ashikaga in Kyoto.

The era of the Restoration and of fighting between the Northern and
Southern Courts was one of great confusion and deeply divided loyalties.
It also marked the last time in premodern history that either the throne
or the courtier class played an active role in the rulership of Japan. In
1392 the Ashikaga, promising a return to the earlier practice of alternate
succession, persuaded the Southern emperor (Godaigo’s grandson) to
return to Kyoto and thus brought to an end the great dynastic schism.
In fact, the Ashikaga never kept their promise about returning to alter-
nate succession and the southern branch of the imperial family slipped
into oblivion. Even the northern branch, although left in possession of the
throne, retained no governing authority whatever, and from this time on
the emperorship was little more than a legitimating talisman for the rule
of successive military houses.

Probably the single most important historical record of the fourteenth
century is a lengthy war tale, covering the period from about 1318 to
1368, with the incongruous-sounding title of Taiheiki or Chronicle of Great
Peace. Although unquestionably inferior in literary quality to The Tale of
the Heike, the Taiheiki has in some respects had a more profound influ-
ence on the way in which the Japanese have viewed their premodern age
of the samurai. Like The Tale of the Heike , the Taiheiki has also been a
rich source for itinerant storytellers and chanters, and in subsequent cen-
turies its most exciting episodes became just as familiar to Japanese every-
where. But whereas The Tale of the Heike has been enjoyed purely as a
military epic, the Taiheiki has become a kind of sourcebook for modern
imperial loyalism.

Although the Southern Court lost in its struggle with the Ashikaga-
dominated Northern Court, later generations (after the end of the medi-

The Canons of Medieval Taste

109

eval age) came increasingly to feel that Godaigo, for all his ineptitude in
governing during the Restoration, had been wrongfully deprived of his
imperial prerogatives by the Ashikaga. These later generations were also
deeply stirred by the accounts in the Taiheiki of the selfless devotion and
sacrifice of the courtiers and samurai who fought for the ill-fated South-
ern cause. And in the modern era, the Japanese have revered the more
prominent of these Southern supporters as the finest examples in their
history of unswerving loyalty to the throne. (At the same time, they have
regarded Ashikaga Takauji and his chief lieutenants as the most unpar-
donable of national traitors.)

Of all the Southern Court heroes — indeed, of all the samurai heroes
in Japanese history — none has been more revered than Kusunoki Masa-
shige (d. 1336), a local warrior of the central provinces, who joined Go-
daigo’s cause at its beginning and eventually gave his life selflessly for it
in battle. In the modern age until the end of World War II in 1945, Masa-
shige was held up as the supreme model of loyalty to the emperor : school-
children, reading about his exploits in their texts, idolized him; and
kamikaze pilots set forth on their suicide missions toward the war’s end
proclaiming themselves modern-day Masashiges.

According to the Taiheiki, Masashige appeared first to Godaigo in a
prophetic dream and, upon being summoned, advised the emperor in
these words:

“The eastern barbarians (i.e., the forces of the Hojo), in their recent rebel-
lion, have drawn the censure of heaven. If we take advantage of their weak-
ness, resulting from the decline and disorder they have caused, what diffi-
culty should we have in inflicting heaven’s punishment upon them? But the
goal of unifying the country must be carried out by means of both military
tactics and carefully devised strategy. Even if we fight them force against force
and although we recruit warriors throughout the more than sixty provinces of
Japan . . . , we will be hard-pressed to win. But if we fight with clever schem-
ing, the military force of the eastern barbarians will be capable of no more
than breaking sharp swords and crushing hard helmets. It will be easy to
deceive them, and there will be no fear. Since the aim of warfare is ultimate
victory, Your Majesty should pay no heed to whether we win or lose in any
single battle. So long as you hear that Masashige alone is alive, know that
your imperial destiny will in the end be attained.

A master of the style of guerrilla warfare developed by Japanese war-
riors— especially those of the central and western provinces — from about
the time of the Mongol invasions, Masashige shrewdly advises Godaigo
to ignore the results of particular battles, since final victory in the war is
the only thing that really matters. At the same time, Masashige pledges
that, so long as he still lives, the emperor’s “imperial destiny . . . will be
attained.”

It is chiefly Masashige, in fact, who keeps the fires of Godaigo ’s loyalist

110

The Canons of Medieval Taste

movement burning in the central provinces until the anti-Hojo forces
swell to a size sufficient to destroy the Kamakura shogunate, and for his
achievements he is well rewarded by the emperor. Later, when Ashikaga
Takauji turns against the Restoration, Masashige again rallies to Go-
daigo’s side. But this time, the Taiheiki tells us, the emperor ignores
Masashige ’s advice about paying no heed to victory or defeat in any single
battle (and the advice's corollary of not risking too much in or expecting
too much of any battle) and insists instead that Masashige and other
loyalist commanders take a do-or-die stand against Takauji at a place
called Minatogawa on the Inland Sea near today's Kobe. Masashige goes
to the Battle of Minatogawa in 1336 knowing that he will die; and, when
the tide of battle turns against them, he and his brother commit suicide
by stabbing each other. Before their deaths, the brothers, in words that
were destined to stir the souls of imperial loyalists through the ages, in-
cluding World War II’s kamikaze pilots, express their wish “to be reborn
again and again for seven lives ... in order to destroy the enemies of the
court!”20 According to the Taiheiki, Godaigo’s loyalist movement — his
“imperial destiny” — is doomed to final failure in large part because of the
emperor’s foolhardy refusal to follow the strategy of Kusunoki Masashige.

Another important literary work of the mid-fourteenth century is the
Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa) , a collection of notes, anecdotes, and
personal observations by Yoshida Kenko (1283-1350), a court poet who
took Buddhist vows in his later years. Written about the time of Go-
daigo’s Restoration (although without a word concerning the momentous
political and military events of the day), the Essays in Idleness is structur-
ally very much like the Heian period miscellany The Pillozv Book . In con-
tent, however, the two books clearly reflect the differences between the
ages in which they were written. Whereas The Pillozo Book is biting, witty,
and “up-to-date,” Kenko ’s work is an elegant expression of the tastes and
feelings of a medieval man who possessed both a fine sensitivity for the
poignancy of life and the perishability of all things and a profound nos-
talgia for the customs and ways of the past.

Unlike the author of Hdjoki in early Kamakura times, Kenko was not
overcome with anguish by the suffering that accompanies the ceaseless
flow and change of life. Indeed, he felt that “the most precious thing in
life is its uncertainty,” and delighted in something precisely because its
beauty promised to be brief or because it already showed signs of fading.
Moreover, Kenko never expressed his love for former times in cloyingly
sentimental terms, but with such simple eloquence as:

In all things I yearn for the past. Modern fashions seem to keep on growing
more and more debased. I find that even among the splendid pieces of furni-
ture built by our master cabinetmakers, those in the old forms are the most
pleasing. And as for writing letters, surviving scraps from the past reveal how
superb the phrasing used to be. The ordinary spoken language has also

The Canons of Medieval Taste

111

steadily coarsened. People used to say “raise the carriage shafts” or “trim the
lamp wick,” but people today say “raise it” or “trim it.”21

The Essays in Idleness has long been revered by the Japanese as a veri-
table bible of traditional aesthetics, and indeed Kenko’s tastes were firmly
grounded in the basic aesthetic values of the Japanese, including natural-
ness, simplicity, suggestion, and perishability. But Kenko may be best
remembered for his articulation, in the following famous passage from
the Essays in Idleness , of still another of these basic values, irregularity or
asymmetry, which became increasingly important to the medieval sense
of beauty:

Somebody once remarked that thin silk was not satisfactory as a scroll wrap-
ping because it was so easily torn. Ton’a replied, “It is only after the silk
wrapper has frayed at top and bottom, and the mother-of-pearl has fallen
from the roller that a scroll looks beautiful.” This opinion demonstrated the
excellent taste of the man. People often say that a set of books looks ugly if all
volumes are not in the same format, but I was impressed to hear the Abbot
Koyu say, “It is typical of the unintelligent man to insist on assembling com-
plete sets of everything. Imperfect sets are better.”

In everything, no matter what it may be, uniformity is undesirable. Leav-
ing something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that
there is room for growth.22

The Muromachi period was the most tumultuous age in Japanese his-
tory. During its two and a half centuries, there was almost continuous
warfare in one part of the country or another. The third Ashikaga shogun,
Yoshimitsu (1358-1408), brought order to much of Japan in the late
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries by skillfully imposing his control
over a group of semi-autonomous regional barons or daimyos that
emerged out of the fighting between adherents of the Northern and
Southern Courts. But after Yoshimitsu’s death, the shogunate steadily
declined; and for its last hundred years or so it was almost completely
powerless as a central government.

Yoshimitsu was not only an outstanding military leader but also a gen-
erous and discerning patron of the arts. Presiding in nearly regal fashion
over both courtier and warrior elites in Kyoto, he was to a great extent
personally responsible for the exceptional flourishing of culture that
occurred in his age, known as the Kitayama epoch after the location of
his monastic retreat, the Golden Pavilion, in the Northern Hills outside
Kyoto (fig. 31).

An important stimulus to Kitayama culture was the renewal by Yoshi-
mitsu of formal contacts with China. Trade and exchange between Japan
and China had been minimized during and after the Mongol invasions.
But, by the early fourteenth century, animosities had subsided on both
sides to the point where Japan’s military rulers felt secure in dispatching

Fig. 31 Golden Pavilion (photograph by Joseph Shulman)

two trading missions to China (in 1325 and 1341) to acquire funds for
the repair of one Zen temple and the construction of another.

In 1368, the same year that Yoshimitsu became shogun, the alien
Mongol dynasty of China was overthrown and was replaced by the Ming
(1368-1644). Shortly after its founding, the Ming made overtures to
Japan requesting aid in the suppression of Japanese-led pirates or wakd.

The Canons of Medieval Taste

113

who had been marauding the coasts of Korea and China in the century
following the Mongol invasions. It was ostensibly in response to these
overtures for assistance that Yoshimitsu entered into official relations with
the Ming, although privately he was no doubt more strongly motivated
to establish such relations from his desire to develop a profitable overseas
trade.

Later nationalist historians have roundly denounced Yoshimitsu for
accepting a tributary relationship with China of the kind that the Japa-
nese had for some eight hundred years steadfastly rejected, even to the
point of precipitating the Mongol invasions a century earlier. Viewed im-
partially, the missions that were sent periodically to China from Yoshi-
mitsu’s time until the end of the Muromachi era were not only commer-
cially profitable, they also provided a steady and highly significant flow
of culture from the Ming to medieval Japan.

The Zen temples of Kyoto took the lead in the first phase of inter-
course with Ming China. These institutions were excellently suited,
owing both to their intimate ties with ruling circles of the shogunate and
the general interests and training of their priesthoods, to serve as traders
and cultural emissaries to China. One important result of their cultural
involvement with China about this time was the production of a large
body of literature and scholarship that is rather loosely termed Gozan
(Five Zen Temples) literature.23 Composed entirely in Chinese, the poetry
and prose of the leading Gozan writers have been judged by many critics
as excessively imitative and pedantic (and far removed from the proper
activities of a branch of Buddhism that theoretically eschewed intellec-
tualism and the written word). There can be no question, on the other
hand, of the great value of the research and pure scholarship undertaken
by the Gozan temples. In addition to exegetical studies on Buddhism and
Confucianism, they compiled dictionaries, encyclopedias, and other ref-
erence-type materials that provided the groundwork for nearly all subse-
quent scholarly activity in premodern Japan.

By far the most splendid cultural achievement of the Kitayama epoch
was the nd (“talent” or “ability”) theatre. The precise origins of no, a
form of drama based on the dance, are unknown; but it is certain that
they were highly diverse, and that no derived from influences both for-
eign and native, aristocratic and plebeian. Among the earliest of such in-
fluences were various types of dance, music, and theatrical entertainment
— including juggling, acrobatics, and magic— imported from China dur-
ing the seventh and eighth centuries. One of these Chinese imports was
converted and ossified by the Japanese into a solemn and stately court
dance called bugaku (done to the accompaniment of gagaku or “elegant
music”), while others enjoyed only a temporary vogue and declined. Still
others, merging with miscellaneous native entertainments and ceremo-
nials, ultimately contributed to the development of no.

114

The Canons of Medieval Taste

The two most popular theatrical forms of the early medieval age were
“monkey music’’ (sarugaku) and “field music” (dengaku). Nobody knows
the exact meaning of the term “monkey music,” although possibly it
comes from the comic-like acrobatics and mimicry practiced by sarugaku
actors. Dengaku, on the other hand, was a type of entertainment based
originally on the singing and dancing of peasants “in the fields” at har-
vest festivals.

By the Kitayama epoch, sarugaku and dengaku , though rivals with their
own schools of performers, appear to have influenced each other to the
point where they were probably quite similar in actual presentation. We
know from the records that both were immensely popular with people in
the capital and elsewhere. The last of the Hojo regents, for example, is
reputed to have loved dengaku and other diversions so much that he com-
pletely neglected his duties at Kamakura; and, in 1349, so many people
crowded in to see a dengaku performance in Kyoto that the stands col-
lapsed and scores were killed.

The fact that sarugaku , rather than dengaku , was transformed during
the Kitayama epoch into no was partially fortuitous. In 1374 Yoshimitsu
attended his first performance of sarugaku and was so captivated by two
of its actors, Kan’ami (1333-84) and his son Zeami (1363-1443), that
henceforth he lavishly patronized their art. This was a most significant
event in Japanese cultural history, since without Yoshimitsu’s backing the
geniuses of Kan’ami and Zeami, who were instrumental in the creation
and perfection of «o, might have been dissipated on a theatrical form that
still catered to rather low and earthy tastes. Given entree to the highest
social circles in Kyoto, these two men elevated and refined sarugaku to a
dramatic art of great beauty and sublimity that could appeal to the most
aristocratic of sensibilities.

Kan’ami and Zeami were not only actors but also playwrights; and
many of the finest plays in the no repertory can either positively or with
reasonable assurance be attributed to their brushes. Zeami, moreover,
was an outstanding critic of his day and has left invaluable commentaries
on medieval aesthetic and dramatic tastes, tastes that he himself was so
influential in molding.

When Zeami first met Yoshimitsu in 1374 he had been a mere child
of eleven, and quite likely it was his physical beauty as much as anything
that first attracted the shogun, who had a particular fondness for pretty
boys. After Yoshimitsu’s death in 1408, Zeami and his school of nd were
temporarily forced into eclipse by those in the shogunate who resented
the extraordinary privileges he had previously received. But the popularity
of no was by this time too firmly established to be readily destroyed.
Before long, it was once again in favor with the Ashikaga shoguns and
enjoyed their patronage for the remainder of the medieval age.

Donald Keene has defined no as “a dramatic poem concerned with

The Canons of Medieval Taste

115

Fig. 32 Scene from a no play (Japan National Tourist Organization)

remote or supernatural events, performed by a dancer, often masked, who
shares with lesser personages and a chorus the singing and declamation
of the poetry.”24 The main dancer or actor is known as the shite, and the
lesser personages include the zuaki or “side person,” who usually intro-
duces the play and asks the questions that induce the shite to tell his
story, and one or more tsure (companions) (fig. 32).

To the uninitiated, no can seem painfully slow and its plots so thin as
to be almost nonexistent. Moreover, there is little if any attempt made in
no to be realistic. It is a theatre of symbolism, employing highly stylized,
even ritualistic manners of speech and movement. The very suggestion
of realism is often deliberately avoided by having, for example, an old
man play the role of a young girl or a little boy that of a great general (all
performers in no, incidentally, are males). The no actor is in particular
expected to cultivate two qualities: monomane or the “imitation of things”;
and yugen. Monomane does not of course mean the capacity to act realis-
tically, but to perform the various symbolic movements demanded by the
roles of the five categories of no plays— god plays, warrior plays, women
plays, miscellaneous plays, and demon plays. Although he regarded mas-
tery of monomane as essential, Zeami stressed that the supreme measure
of the no actor is his ability to convey the mystery and depth of yugen ,
one of the most treasured aesthetic values of the medieval age.

116

The Canons of Medieval Taste

Earlier in this chapter I discussed yugen in terms of “mystery” and
“depth.” Zeami, in one of his critical writings, has this to say about yugen:

In what sort of place, then, is the stage of yugen actually to be found? Let us
begin by examining the various classes of people on the basis of the appear-
ance they make in society. May we not say of the courtiers, whose behavior is
distinguished and whose appearance far surpasses that of other men, that
theirs is the stage of yugen? From this we may see that the essence of yugen
lies in a true state of beauty and gentleness. Tranquility and elegance make
for yugen in personal appearance. In the same way, xht yugen of discourse lies
in a grace of language and a complete mastery of the speech of the nobility
and gentry, so that even the most casual utterance will be graceful.25

Although Zeami has much more to say about yugen elsewhere, and al-
though, like other aesthetic terms, it is far too complex a concept to be
neatly defined in a few lines, it is revealing that, in this passage, Zeami
virtually equates yugen with courtliness (tniyabi): that is, the actor in a no
play can convey yugen by looking like, behaving like, and speaking like a
courtier.

No words can adequately capture the drama and emotional impact of
a no play for the reader who has never actually seen one performed; but
a brief description of a play — Zeami’s haunting Nonomiya or The Shrine
in the Fields — will at least serve to indicate how a work of this form of
medieval Japanese theatre is structured and presented.

The shite or protagonist in The Shrine in the Fields (a woman play) is a
fictional figure from The Tale of Genji, Lady Rokujo, a proud and jealous
lover of Prince Genji. Like so many other plays in the no repertory, it is
opened by an itinerant priest (the zvaki ), who announces that he has been
visiting the famous sites of Kyoto and would like to go to nearby Sagano
to see the Shrine in the Fields where each newly appointed vestal virgin
of the Great Shrine at Ise temporarily resided before proceeding to Ise.
By a mere turn of his body, the priest indicates that he has made the
journey to Sagano, and he kneels before the shrine. As he is praying, a
girl enters and, upon questioning, tells the story of how, when Lady
Rokujo was staying at Nonomiya with her daughter who had been
appointed as the Ise virgin, she was visited by Genji. The time of the
year was autumn, the season most dearly cherished in the Japanese tra-
dition because of its many reminders of the inevitable passing of all
things, and the poetic dialogue of The Shrine in the Fields is suffused with
autumnal melancholy and loneliness. By the end of the first scene, it has
become clear to the priest that the girl is actually the ghost of Lady
Rokujo, who is torn between her continuing worldly passion for Genji
and her desire to achieve Buddhist salvation. In the second and last scene,
the shite, who has temporarily exited, 2f> reappears in the unmistakable
form of Lady Rokujo and dances the shimai, an often protracted dance

The Canons of Medieval Taste

which constitutes the dramatic climax of the play. At the end of her
dance, Lady Rokuj5 steps through the small wooden torii or gateway — the
only prop used in The Shrine in the Fields — and thus symbolically departs
the world and achieves salvation.

Perhaps the best-loved no play is Matsukaze , also a woman play, which
was written by Kan’ami and revised by Zeami. It tells the sad tale of the
ghosts of two sisters — Matsukaze (“Wind-in-the-pines”) and Murasame
(“Autumn rain”)27 — who when alive had spent their days in the lowly
occupation of gathering brine to make salt at their native place of Suma
on the Inland Sea. Once, many many years earlier, a courtier named
Yukihira had spent some time in exile at Suma; and even after his return
to the capital and his death shortly thereafter, the girls remained sunk in
grief over the love they had both felt for him. In the final scene of the
play, as a gale howls and breakers crash at Suma, Matsukaze and Mura-
same vow that they will continue to await Yukihira’s promised return;
but, with the aid of prayers by the priest who has visited them, they are
finally released from their tormented existence, and in the end all that
remains is the memory of their names in the form of “autumn rain” and
“wind in the pines”:

Matsukaze: So we await him. He will come.
Constant ever, green as a pine.

Murasame: Yes, we can trust

his poem:

Chorus: “I have gone away

Matsukaze: Into the mountains of Inaba,
Covered with pines,

But if I hear you pine,

I shall come back at once.”
Those are the mountain pines
Of distant Inaba,

And these are the pines
On the curving Suma shore.
Here our dear prince once lived.
If Yukihira comes again,

I shall go stand under the tree
Bent by the sea-wind,

And, tenderly, tell him
I love him still!

Chorus: Madly the gale howls through the pines,

And breakers crash in Suma Bay;
Through the frenzied night
We have come to you

118

The Canons of Medieval Taste

In a dream of deluded passion.

Pray for us! Pray for our rest!

Now we take our leave. The retreating waves
Hiss far away, and a wind sweeps down
From the mountain to Suma Bay.

The cocks are crowing on the barrier road.

Your dream is over. Day has come.

Last night you heard the autumn rain;

This morning all that is left
Is the wind in the pines.

The wind in the pines.28

Both The Shrine in the Fields and Matsukaze are mugen or “ghostly
dream” plays. Exploiting the “mystery” aspect of th cyugen aesthetic, the
ghostly dream plays, which were especially favored by Zeami, bring
people (both historical figures and characters from fiction) back from the
distant past as mysterious, haunting apparitions. Among the finest of
such plays are those in the category of women plays, such as The Shrine
in the Fields and Matsukaze. But the ghostly dream format was also won-
derfully adapted to warrior plays, nearly all of which are based on epi-
sodes from The Tale of the Heike . The most affecting of the warrior mugen
plays are those that recreate the lives of the fate-driven Taira as they are
hounded and destroyed by the Minamoto in the Genpei War. We noted
that, as portrayed in the Heike , the Taira were transformed into courtly
warriors during their long residence in Kyoto in the second half of the
twelfth century. Some became well-known zuaka poets; others took up
court music, mastering such instruments as the flute and the biwa; and
still others became romantic lovers in the courtier manner. By featuring
the courtly side of the Taira in his warrior plays, Zeami deliberately
catered to the tastes of the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and the mem-
bers of his warrior elite who, as residents of Kyoto during the Muromachi
period, themselves acquired courtly tastes and became courtier-warriors.

Typical of the mugen warrior plays is Atsumori , the story of the youth-
ful Taira commander Atsumori, who is killed by the rough eastern war-
rior Kumagai Naozane as he attempts to escape after the battle of Ichino-
tani, fought in 1184 on the shore of the Inland Sea near today’s Kobe.
Atsumori adheres closely to the story as it is presented in the Heike . After
the Minamoto rout the Taira at Ichinotani, Atsumori tries to flee by
riding his horse out to boats waiting in the offing. But even as he ap-
proaches the boats, he is challenged by and responds to the shouts of
Naozane from the shore to return and fight like a true warrior. In the
ensuing clash, Atsumori is thrown from his horse and pinned to the
ground by Naozane, who tears off his helmet preparatory to taking his
head. Naozane, however, is astounded to see that his foe is a handsome

The Canons of Medieval Taste

119

young man with teeth blackened in the courtier manner who reminds
him of his own son. Although he would spare Atsumori, Naozane must
kill him because other Minamoto partisans are riding toward them and
would surely treat Atsumori even more harshly than he. After taking
Atsumori’s head, Naozane discovers a flute in a pouch at his waist and
realizes that Atsumori was the one who played this instrument in the
Taira camp that morning. Marveling at this evidence of the courtliness
of the Taira, Naozane vows to devote himself thenceforth to praying for
Atsumori’s salvation.

In Atsumori , the zvaki who visits Ichinotani is none other than Kuma-
gai Naozane, who has taken vows and the priestly name of Rensei. At
Ichinotani, Rensei encounters some reapers, one of whom is playing a
flute. After some questioning by Rensei, the flautist reveals that he is the
ghost of Atsumori, who is still torn by the anguish of his defeat and
death. In the final scene of the play, after Atsumori has threatened to kill
Rensei, the two are reconciled by prayers. Atsumori attains salvation and
he and Rensei become companions in Buddhism:

[Reliving the battle of Ichinotani,

Atsumori] looks behind him and sees
That Kumagai pursues him;

He cannot escape.

Then Atsumori turns his horse
Knee deep in the lashing waves,

And draws his sword.

Twice, three times he strikes; then, still saddled,

In close fight they twine; roll headlong together
Among the surf of the shore.

So Atsumori fell and was slain, but now the Wheel of Fate
Has turned and brought him back.

(atsumori rises from the ground and advances toward the
priest with uplifted sword.)

“There is my enemy,” he cries, and would strike,

But the other is grown gentle
And calling on Buddha’s name
Has obtained salvation for his foe;

So that they shall be re-born together
On one lotus-seat.

“No, Rensei is not my enemy.

Pray for me again, oh pray for me again.”29

Another type of theatre, which developed in the shadow of no, was
kydgen (mad words). One kind of kydgen served as an interlude between
the scenes of a no play, during which a rustic or person of the locality ap-
peared and, in words much more understandable than the frequently dif-
ficult language of no, gave additional background information about the
region and the leading characters of the play.

120

The Canons of Medieval Taste

Other kydgen were written as separate skits of a comical or farcical
nature and were often interspersed on the same programs with no plays,
partly to provide relief from the unremitting gloom that pervades nearly
all of no. The humor of these independent kydgen was very broad and
slapstick. Many skits were based on situations in which clever servants
outwitted their daimyo masters. Some scholars have sought to interpret
such kydgen as proof that the lower members of society held strong class
antagonisms against their superiors in medieval times. There were indeed
many instances of social unrest in the medieval age, but it is doubtful
that the antics of kydgen reflected true “class antagonisms.” Kydgen were
produced to entertain and, although occasionally attacked by puritans as
irreverent in tone, they were appreciated by audiences from all stations
of life, including the daimyos and other people derided in them.

Other artistic pursuits of the Kitayama epoch included linked verse,
the tea ceremony, and monochrome painting. But these are more appro-
priately discussed in the context of the second great cultural phase of the
Muromachi era, which occurred during the time of Yoshimitsu’s grand-
son, the eighth Ashikaga shogun Yoshimasa (1436-90).

Yoshimasa became shogun in 1443 at the age of seven and at a time
when great forces of upheaval, from peasant uprisings to quarrels among
unruly daimyos, were at work throughout Japanese society. Even the
strongest of shoguns would have been hard-pressed to hold together the
delicately balanced Ashikaga hegemony at mid-fifteenth century; and
Yoshimasa — young, pampered, and effete — gave no promise whatever of
becoming such a shogun. Yoshimasa was an almost inevitable product of
the gradual merger of courtier and warrior elites that had occurred in
Kyoto since the time of Yoshimitsu. Although the samurai leaders of the
shogunate controlled the imperial court politically, they increasingly suc-
cumbed to the elegant courtier style of life; and in Yoshimasa we find a
scion of the great warrior house of Ashikaga who, though graced with
the title of generalissimo, had scarcely any interest in military matters. In
the 1460s, after more than twenty years as nominal head of the shogun-
ate, Yoshimasa sought to relinquish his official duties entirely in order to
devote himself to what he regarded as the more pleasurable pursuits of
life. Yet, far from slipping gracefully into retirement at this time, Yoshi-
masa helped precipitate a succession dispute between his brother and son
that brought on a frightful holocaust of fighting known as the Onin War
(1467-77).

Actually, the shogunal succession dispute was merely an excuse for two
rival groups of daimyos to engage in a struggle for military supremacy, a
struggle that the shogunate, under the inept Yoshimasa, was powerless
to check. Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Onin War dragged
on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the
once lovely capital lay in ruins.

The Canons of Medieval Taste

121

There was no clear-cut victor in the Onin War. The daimyos had
simply fought themselves into exhaustion, and many returned home to
find their domains in rebellion. Moreover, the Ashikaga shogunate, al-
though it continued in existence until 1573, was from this time a govern-
ment in name only. It was under such conditions that the country slipped
into a century of conflict and disunion known as the “age of provincial
wars/’

Despite the carnage of the Onin War and the widespread disorder that
followed in its wake, the time of Yoshimasa was one of marvelous cul-
tural achievement. Yoshimasa finally managed to transfer the office of
shogun to his son in 1473 — in the midst of the Onin War— and a few
years after the end of hostilities he began construction on a retreat, called
the Silver Pavilion (in contrast to Yoshimitsu’s Golden Pavilion), in the
Higashiyama or Eastern Hills suburb of Kyoto (fig. 33). Though a dismal
failure as a generalissimo, Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy
as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his
name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the
Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of
the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.

In certain cultural pursuits, most notably the no theatre, the Higashi-
yama epoch added little to what had been accomplished earlier. Yoshi-
masa and his cronies loved the no, and sometimes they arranged pro-
grams that lasted for several days. But the epoch produced no artists of
the caliber of Kan’ami or Zeami, whose works proved to be so lofty that
they tended to inhibit further development.

One art that was brought to its highest level of perfection in Higashi-
yama times was linked verse (renga). The idea of two or more people
alternately (or consecutively) composing the 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllable links
of a zvaka and stringing them together one after another was not new.
The Heian courtiers had occasionally engaged in sessions of linked verse
composition for their own amusement, and the pastime became even
more popular at court during the Kamakura period. But it was not until
the fourteenth century that linked verse was given any serious consider-
ation as an art. By this time, the creative potential of the traditional zvaka,
upon which countless generations of Japanese had lavished such unstint-
ing love, was at last exhausted. The zvaka cliques at court dictated such
rigid rules of composition that they throttled the efforts of even the most
imaginative poets. It was partly because linked verse offered freedom
from such restrictions that poets and would-be poets turned increasingly
to it in the Muromachi period.

Still another reason for the spread in popularity of linked verse from
the fourteenth century on was that it stimulated social intercourse. The
leisured Heian courtiers had, of course, been quite socially minded and
indeed seem to have enjoyed a constant round of parties, including those

Fig. 33 Silver Pavilion (photograph by Joseph Shubnan)

that featured poetry recitations and competitions. But the other classes of
premedieval times were, so far as we can discern, greatly restricted both
in their opportunities to socialize and in the range of their social contacts.
Peasants, warrior-peasants, townsmen, and others labored long hours,
and apart from occasional shrine and harvest festivals probably had little
time or inclination to engage in social relations of a purely convivial type
with people outside their immediate families.

The medieval age brought a number of changes that greatly increased
the socializing opportunities for people of all classes, especially the new

The Canons of Medieval Taste

123

ruling elite of samurai and the guilds of artisans and merchants that
emerged in such urban centers as Kyoto, Nara, and the port city of Sakai
on the Inland Sea. Records from the early fourteenth century reveal that
among the pleasures these people enjoyed when they gathered together
socially were dengaku and sarugaku (which we have already noted), com-
munal bathing, the drinking of tea and sake, and the composition of
linked verse.

It would be absurd to mistake a popular diversion for art, and we
should not suppose that the extemporaneous renga poetizing by party-
going peasants, tradesmen, or common samurai produced very many
immortal lines. Nevertheless, there are strong indications that the popu-
laristic tastes of the lower classes did significantly influence the develop-
ment of linked verse in the Muromachi period, just as they contributed
(through dengaku and sarugaku) to the evolution of no.

Linked verse was elevated to the status of a recognized art by the
courtier Nijo Yoshimoto (1320-88), who in 1356 compiled the first im-
perially authorized renga anthology. But it was the masters of the fif-
teenth century who raised linked verse to its highest level. Of these, Shin-
kei (1407-75) is well remembered, not only for his superior poems but
also because of his critical writings on renga. An active Buddhist priest,
Shinkei said much about the essential oneness of pursuing an art, such as
poetry, and seeking religious enlightenment. He also spoke, perhaps more
feelingly than anyone else in the medieval age, about advancing aesthetics
“beyond beauty” into the realm of the cold, withered, and lonely. Here
is how he put it in Sasamegoto (Whisperings):

When a master poet of the past was asked how poetry should be composed,
he replied: “Grasses on the withered moor/The moon at dawn.”

This was his way of saying that one should concentrate on things that cannot
be expressed with words and should become aware of the sphere of cold and
loneliness (hie, sabi). The poems of those who have attained the highest level
in the art of poetry are invariably in the cold and lonely style.10

The most famous of all renga masters was Sogi (1421-1502), a Zen
priest of the Higashiyama epoch who rose from very humble origins and
drew inspiration from his contacts not only with the courtier and samurai
aristocrats of Kyoto but also with the myriad folk he encountered on his
frequent travels into the provinces. Sogi achieved renown as a traveler
similar to that of Saigyo in the early Kamakura period. Although he may
not have been as brilliant a composer of pure poetry as Shinkei, he was
superb in the art of renga , which required a special skill in artistic coop-
eration with other poets for the purpose of linking verses together. In
1488 Sogi and two other poets (Shohaku and Socho) met at the shrine
of Minase, a village south of Kyoto, where they engaged in what is prob-
ably the most famous session of linked verse composition in Japanese his-

124

The Canons of Medieval Taste

tory. The opening lines of their hundred-verse poem, now known as “The
Three Poets of Minase,” go like this:

Sogi:

Snow yet remaining

The mountain slopes are misty —
An evening in spring.

Shohaku :

Far away the water flows

Past the plum-scented village.

Socho:

In the river breeze

The willow trees are clustered.
Spring is appearing.

Sogi:

The sound of a boat being poled
Clear in the clear morning light.

Shohaku:

The moon! does it still

Over fog-enshrouded fields
Linger in the sky?

Socho:

Meadows carpeted in frost —
Autumn has drawn to a close.*1

These poets have skillfully constructed their verses to provide flow and
continuity from one link to another by the use of various associative
devices: when Sogi, for example, mentions spring, Shohaku uses the
vernal expression “plum-scented”; and when Shohaku refers to the moon
(which is always associated with the fall), Socho promptly shifts to the
autumn time. Yet, however delightful such devices may be as employed
by the Minase masters, their use was indicative of the fact that linked
verse, like zoaka, was becoming excessively restricted by conventions; and
in time it too ceased to provide a means for truly creative expression.

One of the finest cultural achievements of the medieval age was the
tea ceremony (chanoyu). So far as we know, tea was first brought to Japan
from China by Buddhist priests in the early ninth century— that is, at
the beginning of the Heian period. Tea drinking, which had been ele-
vated to a cultured pastime in China during the T’ang dynasty, became
popular at the Japanese court in Kyoto as part of the general enthusiasm
in that age for all things Chinese. The drinking of tea also found a place
in Buddhist temples, where it was incorporated into various religious
rituals. But after the long period of cultural borrowing from China that
had begun in the late sixth century came to an end in the mid-ninth cen-
tury, tea drinking gradually declined and may even have died out in
Japan.

Tea was reintroduced to Japan from China in the late twelfth century,
about the time of the founding of the Kamakura shogunate, by the Zen
priest Eisai (also pronounced Yosai; 1 141-1215), founder of the Rinzai

The Canons of Medieval Taste

125

sect of Zen. Following the lead of Chinese devotees of tea, Eisai extolled
the beverage’s medicinal value, even writing a book, Kissa Ydjdki ( Book
on Improving Health by Drinking Tea), that recommended tea as an elixir
for extending one’s life during the age of mappo , when “man has gradu-
ally declined and grown weaker, so that his four bodily components and
five organs have degenerated.”32 As Eisai explains in the Kissa Ydjdki ,

The five organs [liver, lungs, heart, spleen, kidney] have their own taste pref-
erences. If one of these preferences is favored too much, the corresponding
organ will get too strong and oppress the others, resulting in illness. Now
acid, pungent, sweet, and salty foods are eaten in great quantity, but not
bitter foods [which the heart prefers]. Yet when the heart becomes sick, all
organs and tastes are affected. . . . But if one drinks tea [with its bitter taste],
the heart will be strengthened and freed from illness.33

Eisai also urged the use of tea, a stimulant, for keeping awake during long
hours of seated meditation in Zen temples.

Sometime between the Japanese abandonment of tea in the mid-Heian
period and its reintroduction to Japan by Eisai in the late twelfth century
there occurred in China two related developments that had a profound
influence on the character of the tea ceremony as it was subsequently
created by the medieval Japanese: the use of powdered tea and the in-
vention of the bamboo tea scoop (in Japanese, chaseti ) with which to stir
powdered tea to dissolve it in hot water. The Chinese themselves later
stopped drinking powdered tea; and today, virtually all the tea that is
consumed in the world — whether red (fermented) tea, oolong (semifer-
mented) tea, or green (unfermented) tea — is prepared by infusion: that is,
by immersing tea leaves in hot water. The only use of powdered tea is in
chanoyu . (In their everyday lives the Japanese, like everyone else, drink in-
fused tea.)

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tea drinking spread
among all classes of Japan, and tea became a national drink. The tea
that was prized most was that grown at Toganoo in the mountains to the
northwest of Kyoto. Beginning in the fourteenth century, parties held in
Kyoto by members of the samurai elite of the Muromachi shogunate fea-
tured tea-judging contests ( tocha ), the object of which was to distinguish
between Toganoo tea and tea grown in other regions of Japan. The extra-
ordinarily high esteem in which Toganoo tea was held can be observed in
the fact that it was called “real tea” (honcha) and the other teas were dis-
missed as “non-tea” (hicha)J4

The tea-judging contests, which became something of a craze, were
often accompanied by linked-verse sessions and, afterward, by the drink-
ing of sake, communal bathing, and gambling.35 In all, the contests and
their sequels must have been lively, frequently bawdy, occasions. A certain
parvenu daimyo named Sasaki Doyo (1306-73) became especially con-

126

The Canons of Medieval Taste

spicuous about mid-fourteenth century for the gala tea parties he threw.
In staging these parties, Doyo ostentatiously displayed his collection of
Chinese objets d’art, including ceramics and other articles used in the
preparation and drinking of tea, samples of calligraphy, and painted
screens and hanging scrolls.

Doyo’s flaunting of his “foreign pieces” was symptomatic of the gen-
eral passion for all things Chinese among the newly affluent samurai
leaders of the fourteenth century. Envoys who went to China on behalf
of these leaders eagerly purchased all the works of art they could find,
particularly paintings attributed to Sung and Yuan masters. In the pro-
cess, they exercised very little critical judgment, accepting many pictures
simply on verbal guarantees of their authenticity or on the basis of seals
that could easily have been forged. As a consequence, many of the most
dearly cherished items in the Chinese art collections of men like Sasaki
Doyo were quite likely of dubious value.

Not until the Higashiyama epoch did the Japanese begin to take care-
ful stock of the numerous artworks and antiques they had so randomly
imported from China for several centuries. Yoshimasa assigned members
of a group called the “companions” (doboshu) to survey and catalog the
shogunal collection, by this time the largest single accumulation of Chi-
nese treasures in Japan. The companions were artistically talented and
discriminating men who were on very intimate terms with the shogun
and who were entrusted with the general conduct of his cultural affairs.
They included the “three ami”16 (Noami, 1397-1471; his son Geiami,
1431-85; and the latter's son Soami, d. 1525); and in tasks such as the
cataloging of the shogunal art collection, which was done chiefly by
Noami and Geiami, these men set the standards for subsequent art con-
noisseurship in Japan.

Chanoyu evolved during the fifteenth century. We cannot trace with
historical accuracy each stage in this evolution, but we can hypothesize
that the first was the adoption of rules for the preparation, serving, and
consumption of tea and that the second was the creation of a setting —
the tea room (chashitsu)— in which people gathered for tea. In the begin-
ning, tea was prepared in a separate kitchen or outside corridor and then
brought into the tea room. By subsequently moving the entire process of
preparation, serving, and consumption of tea into a single room, the fif-
teenth-century creators of chanoyu established a microcosmic, self-con-
tained “world of tea.”

The tea room (chashitsu) was an offshoot of a new style of room — the
shoin room — that appeared during the fifteenth century. The rooms of
the earlier shinden mansions of the Heian courtiers had been little more
than spaces enclosed by walls, sliding doors (fusuma), and folding screens
and other removable partitions. Their floors were of bare wood, and most
rooms had no built-in features and little furniture. People sat on mats

The Canons of Medieval Taste

127

Fig. 34 Shoin -style of interior architecture: at the right end of the far wall is the
writing desk; to the left of it are the asymmetrical overhanging shelves ( chigai -
dana); the floor is covered with tatami matting, and fusurna and shoji sliding
doors can be seen in the left and right walls (drazving by Arthur T'lcisher)

placed on the floors as needed. During the medieval age, standardized
rush matting (tatami) was increasingly used to cover floors entirely, and
walls and sliding doors formed the sidings of all rooms. The sliding doors
of this age were of two types: the traditional fusuma and the newer, lighter
shoji, which consisted of latticelike wooden frameworks with translucent
rice paper pasted on one side.

Derived from the study chambers built for priests in Zen temples, the
shoin room became the prototype for the main living room of the modern
Japanese house. In addition to wall-to-wall tatami, fusuma, and shoji, the
shoin room came to have the following installed features: a floor-level writ-
ing desk built into one wall (called a shoin desk); asymmetrical overhang-
ing shelves (chigaidana) ; and a tokonoma or alcove (fig. 34).

The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the
sixteenth century. All tea rooms featured alcoves for the display of hang-
ing scrolls and flower arrangements, but some lacked the shoin desk, the
asymmetrical shelves, or both. Tea rooms also usually had special fea-
tures, such as small, sunken hearths for teakettles, to be used in chanoyu;
and from the end of the sixteenth century, as we will see in the next
chapter, many tea rooms were constructed with nijiriguchi or “crawling
in” entrance ways.

Chanoyu, as it reached its first important stage of development in the

128

The Canons of Medieval Taste

Fig. 35 Shigaraki-ware water container for the tea ceremony,
early Edo period (Honolulu Academy of Arts, Gift of Robert Aller-
ton, 1964 [3311.1])

Higashiyama epoch of the late fifteenth century, was performed in a shorn
room of ample size-perhaps six to eight tatami mats or larger — and em-
ployed only imported “Chinese articles” (karamono) , including kettles,
bowls, caddies, and water jars, for the preparation and serving of tea.
Before the commencement of a tea ceremony, all these articles (except
the kettle, if the charcoal fire had already been prepared in it) were placed
on the shelves of a Chinese-style black lacquered stand called daisu. In
the alcove, the host typically displayed a Chinese painting and perhaps a
flower arrangement.

But even as this style of tea ceremony took shape in the Higashiyama
epoch, the sprouts of another style also appeared. The originator of this

The Canons of Medieval Taste

129

new style was Murata Shuko (or Juko; d. 1 502), a man of merchant back-
ground from Nara who was an earnest student of Zen Buddhism. Shuko
said:

In pursuing this way [of tea], extreme care should be taken to harmonize
Japanese and Chinese tastes. This is of great importance and should be given
careful attention. How absurd it is these days for those who are inexperienced
to covet with self-satisfaction such things as Bizen and Shigaraki wares on
the grounds that they possess the quality of being “cold and withered” and
to try, even though scorned by others, to show how advanced they are [in
the way] . 57

These remarks are included in a letter Shuko purportedly wrote to a dis-
ciple and is the only surviving document we have that is attributed to him.
Most of what else we know about Shuko as a tea master is contained in
workings on chanoyu that date from about a century after his death.

Shuko’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and
Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in
the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and
“aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured
imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that
used native ceramics, such as the rough-textured, muted, and often
flawed wares of kilns such as Bizen and Shigaraki (fig. 35). Aesthetically,
this u^as a significant transition, because it represented a reassertion of
such basic native values as naturalness and irregularity. Shuko’s descrip-
tion of Bizen and Shigaraki wares as cold and withered is a reflection of
the fact that he, like his successors in the sixteenth century, w?as strongly
influenced by the aesthetics of linked verse formulated by Shinkei and
others. In chanoyuy cold and withered were tastes that pointed in the
direction of the zoabi aesthetic; and indeed, the new kind of tea ceremony
originated by Shuko is called wabicha, or “tea based on zvabi .” Developed
primarily by Shuko’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is
a subject for the next chapter.

Another art that flourished in the Muromachi period was mono-
chrome painting (sumi-e) done in the manner evolved several centuries
earlier by artists of the Sung dynasty in China. Like their Japanese coun-
terparts of this later age, the Sung monochrome artists painted a variety
of subjects, including Zen abbots, folk deities, and flowers and birds.
But their primary interest lay in landscapes (known in Japanese as sansui
or pictures of mountains and water). And indeed Sung monochrome
landscapes are among the more striking works of Chinese art. They are,
moreover, perhaps the most supremely moving tributes of any people to
the grandeur and vastness of nature.

The Sung masters did not attempt to reproduce nature as it really
was; rather, they employed bold and even daring brushwork to capture

130

The Canons of Medieval Taste

in stylized outline misty scenes of forests, jagged cliffs, waterfalls, and
awesome mountains (the most distant of which often seem to be on the
point of vanishing into space). Human figures sketched into these land-
scapes are usually antlike in size. We see them, insignificant figures en-
gulfed by the cosmos, as lone travelers moving slowly along mountain
trails or as recluses seated in pavilion-like huts nestled on the sides of
towering peaks.

Sung brushwork owed much to the techniques of calligraphy, and it is
in fact common to discuss such brushwork in terms of the three main
styles of Chinese calligraphic writing, the “standing,” “walking”’ and
“running” styles. The first of these is distinguished by thick, angular
strokes, the second by lines that are thinner and more cursive, and the
third — the running style — by impressionistic flourishes and splashes of
ink. Some artists preferred to paint chiefly in one style or another. But
many used all three simultaneously, typically doing foregrounds in the
standing style, middle distances in the walking, and backgrounds in the
running.

Sung monochrome painting appealed particularly to the medieval
Japanese because its medium of black ink was so compatible with the
cold, withered, and lonely tastes of the age. In the first phase of painting
in the Sung manner during the fourteenth century, Japanese artists
devoted themselves primarily to portrait and figure work; but in the fif-
teenth century they turned increasingly to landscapes.

Among the greatest masters of monochromatic ink work of the fif-
teenth century was Shubun (d. 1450), a Zen priest of the Shokokuji,
one of the Gozan or Five Zen Temples of Kyoto. Although Shubun, who
was active during the second quarter of the century, is reputed to have
painted many different subjects in a variety of mediums, the only extant
works attributed to him are landscapes, mostly on folding screens and
sliding doors. A typical Shubun landscape is “visionary” in that it is a
depiction, derived wholly from imagination, of a scene set in China (fig.
36). Like that of other Japanese artists of his time, Shubun’s work is also
impressionistic, since space is not clearly differentiated (that is, it is diffi-
cult to judge the relative depths of the various sections of a painting) and
mountains, cliffs, and other pictorial elements often appear to be sus-
pended or not properly integrated with the rest of the landscape. By con-
trast, Sung-style landscapes by Chinese artists are notable for the care
with which they are constructed: foregrounds, middle distances, and
backgrounds are clearly distinguishable and all parts of a picture “fit
together” into a coherent reproduction, albeit stylized, of a view from
nature.

Thus there appears to have been a fundamental difference in the ap-
proach to landscape between the Sung-style Chinese artist and such Japa-
nese painters as Shubun, a difference that seems to consist in the fact that

Fig. 36 Landscape attributed to Shubun (Seattle
Art Museum)

132

The Canons of Medieval Taste

the Chinese artist was as much concerned with philosophy as with aes-
thetics. Drawing on his Confucian tradition, he sought to portray in
nature the kind of harmony and overall agreement of parts that ideally
ought to prevail in human society. In other words, the Chinese artist
tried to make a social statement; and the greater the sense of structure
and depth he could incorporate into his landscapes, the greater the phi-
losophy of his work.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their
art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or struc-
ture; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human
society with the harmonies of nature. Rather, they have most character-
istically depicted nature — in their poetry, painting, and other arts — in
particularistic glimpses. The Chinese Sung-style master may have ad-
mired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the
typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been
more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects: for example, how
it looks when covered with snow or when partly obscured by mists or
clouds.

Shubun’s disciple and successor was Sesshu (1420-1506), who was
also affiliated as a priest with the Zen temple of Shokokuji. Shortly before
the outbreak of the Onin War, Sesshu journeyed to Yamaguchi in the
western provinces of Honshu, where he came under the patronage of
the daimyo family of Ouchi, With Ouchi backing, Sesshu went to Ming
China in 1467 and remained there until 1469. During his two-year stay
abroad, he traveled widely and did many sketches and paintings of the
Chinese countryside. Curiously perhaps, Sesshu was little inspired by the
work of contemporary Ming artists. He professed that his idols remained
the venerable Sung monochrome masters and his own countryman,
Shubun.

Nevertheless, we can see a dramatic change in the landscape painting
of Sesshu when compared with that of Shubun. Instead of atmospheric,
spatially undifferentiated scenes with “ floating” mountains and the like,
we find flattened surfaces and often a total disregard for perspective
based on depth. “Winter Landscape” (fig. 37) illustrates the major new
features of Sesshu’s art. Although the scene leads to mountains in the
distant background, there is no sense of great depth; and the mountains
themselves are not even three-dimensional, but resemble flat cutouts
propped against the back of the picture. The most startling part of the
winter landscape, however, is its top center, where a jagged black line ap-
pears like a tear in the picture and, next to it, there is an abstract mosaic
of surfaces that looks startlingly like the work of a modern cubist painter.

By Sesshu’s time, it had become standard practice for artists to sign
or affix their personal seals to all of their works. Hence, there is little
doubt about the authenticity of the many paintings of his that have been

Fig. 37 “Winter Landscape” by Sesshu (Tokyo National Museum)

134

The Canons of Medieval Taste

preserved. One of Sesshu's most famous pieces, still owned by the suc-
cessor family to the Ouchi in Yamaguchi, is a horizontal landscape scroll
some fifty-two feet in length and sixteen inches in height known as the
“Long Landscape Scroll." It directs the viewer, as he runs his eyes from
right to left, through an ever-shifting but integrated series of landscape
settings and changing seasons. Sesshu's special love for the axlike, angular
strokes of the standing style of brushwork is particularly evident in this
scroll. We can also observe in it — in addition to the inclination, as in the
“Winter Landscape,” to flatten surfaces — a liking for the decorative place-
ment of objects in a manner that was to become increasingly marked
among Japanese painters from the sixteenth century on.

Another outstanding painting by Sesshu is the hanging scroll or kake-
mono that depicts Ama-no-Hashidate, a bay on the Japan Sea coast to
the northeast of Kyoto (fig. 38). Sesshu’s use of a soft style to reproduce
this lovely setting of mountains, water, and an unusual pine-covered sand-
bar extending nearly across the mouth of the bay seems especially appro-
priate. More important from the standpoint of the development of Japa-
nese monochrome painting is the fact that he has here drawn an actual
site in Japan and not simply an idealized representation of some Chinese-
looking scene.

It would be pleasurable to discuss other types of paintings done by
Sesshu — including portraits and studies of flowers and birds — that have
also contributed to his reputation among many critics as Japan’s greatest
artist. But space allows only a few comments on still another kind of
monochrome landscape in which he excelled, the landscape executed
entirely in the running or “splashed ink” style. The best known of these
is a hanging scroll in the Tokyo National Museum that Sesshu painted in
1495 (fig. 39). It is an abstract representation of trees on a small island
or jut of land with great mountains just faintly visible in the background.
Although at first glance this picture may appear to be something that
Sesshu simply “dashed off,” closer examination reveals how superb a
creation it is. One detects, for example, such details as the rooftops of
buildings near the water’s edge and rowers in a boat just offshore. It is in
extremely abbreviated, impressionistic paintings of this sort that one per-
ceives most directly the intense feeling for nature that motivated artists
like Sesshu.

A major form of art that was strongly influenced by monochrome ink
painting in the Muromachi period was landscape gardening. The origin
of the Japanese love of gardens lies, no doubt, in Shinto animism — the
belief that kami spirits inhabit nature — and was manifested in ancient
times by the marking off or enclosure of sacred spaces of ground, some-
times simply with rocks (forming areas called iwasaka) and sometimes
with rocks joined by loosely hanging ropes (himorogi). Rocks were
thought to be especially favored abodes of the kami and, as in all subse-

Fig. 38 Ama-no-Hashidate by Sesshu (Consulate General of Japan, New York ,

Fig. 39 “Splashed ink” scroll of Sesshu (Tokyo National Museum)

The Canons of Medieval Taste

137

quent Japanese gardens, those of the iwasaka and himorogi were used in
their natural state and were not sculpted or otherwise altered. Here we
see early examples of the aesthetic of naturalness, which has been a fun-
damental characteristic of Japanese gardens throughout the centuries.
Even in its most stylized form, the Japanese garden has always been con-
ceived as a representation of a natural setting. Its antithesis is the geo-
metrically arranged garden, which has often been favored in the West and
which is based on the imposition of human concepts of spatial design
upon nature.

The chronicles indicate that Japanese aristocrats from at least the mid-
eighth century customarily had gardens near their homes; and during the
Heian period, as we observed, a fairly standard type of garden evolved in
conjunction with the rambling shinden- style of courtier mansion. Situated
directly in front of the mansion, the garden was built around a stream-fed
pond with a small, artificial island in its center. For the pleasure-loving
Heian courtiers, such a garden was both a source of visual delight and
an excellent setting for outdoor parties.

Later in the Heian period, with the growth in popularity of Pure Land
Buddhism, the shinden style of both architecture and garden was adapted
to the construction of temples that were conceived as representations on
earth of Amida’s paradise in the western realm of the universe. One of
the earliest and finest examples of this kind of temple was, of course, the
Byodoin at Uji.

During the medieval age, the Japanese, while still retaining such fea-
tures of their traditional garden as the pond, stream (often dammed at
some point to create a small waterfall), and artificial island, began to
experiment in new and abstract ways with the use of rocks. The pioneer
in this kind of experimentation was the Zen priest Muso Soseki (1275-
1351), designer of the famous moss garden at the Saihoji in Kyoto. Muso
and his successors increasingly used rocks of varying shapes and textures
to represent both natural formations and man-made structures, such as
mountains, cliffs, waterfalls, and bridges. In addition, they employed sand
and white pebbles as “water” and thus, in some of their works, eliminated
the pond, which for so many centuries had been the central feature of
the Japanese garden.

It was during and after the Higashiyama epoch that the finest of
the medieval dry rock gardens, known as kare-sansui or “withered land-
scapes,” were built, all on the grounds of Zen temples. Some of these
gardens, such as the kare-sansui at the Daisen’in abbacy of Daitokuji
Temple in Kyoto, are reproductions in miniature of scenes from nature.
In the Daisen’in garden, for example, we see in the background several
large rocks representing towering mountains; and in the middle distance
there is a flat, bridgelike rock and, flowing beneath it, a “river” of white
sand (fig, 40). This and other kare-sansui are very much like three-dimen-

Fig, 40 Garden at the Daisen’in of the Daitokuji Temple (photograph by Joseph
Shulman)

sional monochrome ink paintings and are based on the same aesthetics
as sumi-e. Not surprisingly, some of the leading monochrome artists of the
age, such as Sesshu and Soami, were also noted designers of gardens.

Perhaps the most famous Japanese rock garden is the kare-sansui at
the Ryoanji Temple in Kyoto (fig. 41). Consisting of a flat, rectangular
surface of raked white sand with fifteen rocks scattered about singly and
in clusters, the Ryoanji garden is ostensibly a representation of the ocean
with islands protruding above its surface. The representation of an island
or islands in the ocean can be traced back to the early evolution of gar-
dens in historical times, and indeed the pond and island of the garden of
the Heian period shinden estate derived from this tradition. But the Ryo-
anji garden, consisting solely of rocks and sand, is so extremely severe in
layout that it seems to be an ultimate visual depiction of the medieval
aesthetics of the withered, cold, and lonely. As abstract art, it may well
be compared to a scroll of calligraphy (black ink on white paper) or to a
painting in the splashed-ink style of sumi-e .

Many of the major arts discussed in this chapter, including the tea
ceremony, monochrome painting, and landscape gardening, have come
to be regarded as constituents of a distinctive “Zen culture” of Muro-
machi Japan. There is no question that members of the Zen priesthood
were among the leaders in the development of Japan’s medieval culture.
Moreover, nearly all of the arts of the middle and late medieval age were

Fig. 41 Garden at the Ryoanji Temple (Consulate General of Japan, New York)

governed by aesthetic tastes — such as simplicity, restraint, and a liking for
the weathered, imperfect, and austere (sabi and zvabi) — which, although
not exclusively Zen in origin, certainly came to be associated with the Zen
attitude. The only serious objection to the term “Zen culture” is that it
may be interpreted to mean a religious culture. Obviously one can argue
that all true art must somehow be spiritually or religiously moving. Never-
theless, apart perhaps from certain paintings that portrayed Zen holymen
or depicted scenes associated with the quest for satori, the Zen culture of
Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be
strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become
secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man
was largely psychological.

The Country Unified

The last century of the Muromachi period, following the devastating
Onin War of 1467-77, has been fittingly labeled the age of provincial
wars. Although its first few decades witnessed the blossoming of Higashi-
yama culture, the age was otherwise the darkest and most troubled in
Japanese history. Fighting raged from one end of the country to the other.
The Ashikaga shoguns became totally powerless, and the domains of
many daimyos were torn asunder either by the internecine warfare of
vassals or by great peasant uprisings.

Among those most directly and adversely affected by the Onin War
were the Kyoto courtiers, so long the bearers of traditional culture in
Japanese history. Many courtiers had already departed from the capital
during the war for safety elsewhere, and others followed after the end of
hostilities. A number of prominent courtiers with special artistic and
scholarly abilities accepted invitations to visit the more stable and pros-
perous provincial daimyos, who wished to infuse some of the cultural
brilliance of Kyoto into their domainial capitals.

The cultural interests of the courtiers of the late fifteenth century were
overwhelmingly antiquarian. They produced very little literature or art of
note but rather devoted themselves to exegetical studies of the glorious
poetry and prose works of their Heian predecessors, works such as the
Kokinshu, The Tales of Ise, and The Tale of Genji. Ever more covetous of
their role as custodians of the past, they even established secret or arcane
interpretations of these classics which, in their increasingly straitened
financial circumstances, they eagerly sought to purvey for cash.

Like the courtier class in general, the imperial family also suffered
grievously in the age of provincial wars. Emperors, although still theoreti-
cally sovereign over the land, had long been mere figures of ceremony at
court. From about the time of the Onin War they gradually withdrew
from participation in all but the most essential courtly functions, and
often they found themselves embarrassingly unable even to defray the
costs of the latter. The coronation of an emperor of the early sixteenth
century, for example, was postponed for more than twenty years for lack
of funds.

The Country Unified

141

Still another group whose influence was greatly reduced by the Onin
War was the Zen priesthood of the Gozan temples of Kyoto. Along with
the courtiers, the Gozan Zen priests depended heavily on the patronage
of the Ashikaga shogunate, especially the opportunity this patronage gave
them to accompany the cultural and trading missions to Ming China.
With the collapse of the shogunate as a central governing body in the
Onin War, initiative in the Ming trade was more and more assumed by
certain daimyo houses based in Kyushu and the region of the Inland Sea.
We have observed that the Zen priest and artist Sesshu, although formally
associated with the Shokokuji Temple in Kyoto, left the capital during the
Onin War to take up residence in the Ouchi domain and subsequently
journeyed to China under Ouchi auspices. Sesshu was simply the most
outstanding personality attracted by the Ouchi during these years in
their attempt to make Yamaguchi, their domainial capital, the “Kyoto of
the west.”

Although the age of provincial wars was a time of great upheaval and
seemingly endless disorder, we can see in retrospect that important insti-
tutional processes were under way, especially in the evolution of rule at
the regional level of Japanese society, that were to make possible a rapid
unification of the country at the end of the sixteenth century. Certain
daimyos, such as the Ouchi, had managed to weather the Onin War and
its aftermath; but most of the other great daimyo houses of the early
Muromachi period were destroyed in the final decades of the fifteenth
century. Gradually, during the early sixteenth century, a new class of
regional barons emerged as the masters of domains which, although
generally smaller than the territorial possessions of the pre-Onin War
daimyos, were more tightly organized as autonomous units capable of
survival in a time of constant civil strife.

These new daimyos of the age of provincial wars were a sturdy and in
many ways progressive breed of men, who devoted all their energies to
strengthening and expanding their domainial rule. They gathered their
vassals into more permanent fighting units, compiled legal codes to cover
the altered conditions of the age, and adopted a variety of policies to
encourage both agricultural and commercial development and even to
exploit, through mining operations and the like, the nonagrarian natural
resources of their domains.

By mid-sixteenth century, much of Japan had been brought under the
control of this new class of daimyos, and the stage was set for a general
competition among the more powerful of them to undertake the task of
restoring order to the entire country. Unification and the establishment
of a lasting military hegemony were ultimately carried out by three great
chieftains — Oda Nobunaga (1534-82), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98),
and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) — all of whom came from the region
of modern Nagoya, midway between the central provinces and the Kanto.

142

The Country Unified

Nobunaga took the first important step toward unification when he
led his armies into Kyoto in 1568. Five years later he deposed the puppet
Ashikaga shogun and thus officially dissolved the long-moribund Muro-
machi shogunate. Nobunaga then set about expanding his power outward
from Kyoto, dealing in turn with various enemies that included other
daimyos, the members of Buddhist sects, and militant peasant bands. A
hard and ruthless campaigner, Nobunaga often inflicted savage punish-
ment on those who opposed him. Perhaps the most conspicuous example
of this was his attack in 1571 on the Enryakuji Temple of Mount Hiei,
whose monks had refused either to join him or to remain neutral in the
struggle for control of the central provinces. Circling Mount Hiei, Nobu-
naga’s forces marched up its sides, not only destroying the thousands of
buildings that constituted the temple complex but also killing everyone
they found from the monks to the many folk who had been drawn from
nearby villages for sanctuary on the mountain. Thus, in an orgy of slaugh-
ter, Nobunaga virtually obliterated the greatest scholarly and religious
center of ancient Japan.

In 1 582, while he was in the process of directing his armies against the
western provinces, Nobunaga was assassinated at the age of forty-nine
by one of his generals. His death was speedily avenged by another gen-
eral, Hideyoshi, who thereupon assumed the mantle of unifier and, within
eight years, brought the remainder of Japan under his control. Hideyoshi,
probably the greatest military commander in Japanese history, rose by
sheer ability and drive from the ranks of the peasantry to become national
overlord, a career record that was exceptional even in this dynamic age.

Although invincible in his march to power in Japan, Hideyoshi ignomi-
niously failed in two attempts to invade Korea in 1592 and 1597. He was
apparently motivated to undertake these foreign adventures both from the
desire for new lands to conquer and the wish to open by force new ave-
nues of trade with the continent. The first invasion attempt was repulsed
by Chinese armies that poured down from the north across the Yalu
River, and the second was terminated upon Hideyoshi’s death in 1 598.

When Hideyoshi died he left an infant son to succeed him, and before
long a struggle for power ensued in which two great leagues of daimyos
confronted each other. The head of one of these leagues was Tokugawa
Ieyasu, a daimyo now based at Edo (modern Tokyo) in the Kanto, who
had faithfully served Nobunaga and had later reluctantly submitted to
Hideyoshi. The victory of Ieyasu’s league over its coalition of opponents
in a decisive clash of arms at Sekigahara in 1 600 enabled the Tokugawa
chieftain to impose a new hegemony over Japan and establish a military
government, known as the Tokugawa shogunate, that was to endure until
the beginning of modern times in the late nineteenth century.

The age of unification under Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu was a
particularly lively and exciting one in premodern Japanese history, not

The Country Unified

143

only because of the spectacular military exploits of these three great
unifiers but also because of the arrival of Europeans in Japan. It was the
Portuguese who led the European maritime explorations of the fifteenth
century down the coast of Africa and into Asian waters. They rounded
the Cape of Good Hope and touched India in 1498; and within another
fifteen years or so they reached China, where they established a perma-
nent trading station at Macao in 1559. Portuguese traders first set foot on
Japanese soil about 1543,1 landing in a Chinese junk on the small island
of Tanegashima off the coast of Kyushu.

Christian missionaries followed shortly in the wake of Portuguese
traders to Japan. Europe was at the time aflame with the fervor of the
Counter Reformation, and the king of Portugal had undertaken sponsor-
ship of the recently formed and militantly aggressive Society of Jesus. It
was, in fact, one of the leaders of the Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier (1506-
52), who inaugurated Christian missionary activity in Japan. During his
stay there from 1549 until 1551, Xavier developed a strong liking for the
Japanese people as well as high optimism for the prospects of conversion
among them. Comparing the Japanese to others the Jesuits were then
seeking to convert, he observed: “Judging by the people we have so far
met, I would say that the Japanese are the best race yet discovered and I
do not think you will find their match among the pagan nations.”2 An-
other of the early Jesuit missionaries to Japan commented: “These Japa-
nese are better disposed to embrace our holy Faith than any other people
in the world.”3

No doubt one reason why Xavier and other European visitors of this
age to the Far East felt a certain preference for the Japanese over other
Asians they encountered was that the warring, feudal conditions of six-
teenth-century Japan reminded them so much of home. The Jesuits in
particular, with their special liking for martial order and discipline, could
readily appreciate the rigorous lifestyle of Japan's ruling samurai class.
Here are some of their observations about the Japanese martial spirit:

“The Japanese are much braver and more warlike than the people of
China, Korea, Ternate and all the other nations around the Philippines,”

“There is no nation in the world which fears death less.”

“I fancy that there are no people in the world more punctilious about their
honour than the Japanese, for they will not put up with a single insult or even
a word spoken in anger.”4

Most of the missionary work of the Jesuits in the first decade or so after
their arrival in Japan was restricted to those daimyo domains in Kyushu
where the Portuguese trading ships made their calls. Not until the rise of
Nobunaga were conditions sufficiently settled to allow them to extend
their proselytizing activities to other parts of the country, especially to the
central provinces. Nobunaga showed himself to be quite well disposed
toward the Christian fathers, and on several occasions granted them per-

144

The Country Unified

sonal interviews. One apparent reason for his cordiality was his hope that
the Jesuits might be useful in combating, at least doctrinally, those Bud-
dhist sects of the capital region that opposed his advance to national
power.

Hideyoshi was also friendly toward the Jesuits in his early years as mili-
tary hegemon. He was keenly interested in foreign trade and, through
courtesies extended to the missionaries, sought to lure an ever greater
number of Portuguese ships to Japan. Hideyoshi also sent forth his own
trading vessels (known as vermilion seal ships from the documents of
authorization they carried bearing such seals) and Japanese traders were
seen during these years in ports of countries as distant as the Philippines,
Cambodia, and Siam.

Portuguese ships had in the beginning dropped anchor in various har-
bors on the northern and western coasts of Kyushu. More often than not,
they selected their ports of call on the basis of whether or not the local
daimyos were tolerant of or welcomed Christianity. Undoubtedly the con-
version of a number of Kyushu daimyos to Christianity about this time
was motivated partly, if not entirely, by their desire to attract Portuguese
trade. One of the most prominent of the Christian daimyos was Omura
Sumitada, who in 1570 opened the harbor of Nagasaki in his domain to
Portuguese commerce and ten years later ceded it as a territorial posses-
sion to be administered by the Jesuits.

By the late 1 580s, when Hideyoshi carried his campaign of unification
to Kyushu, Nagasaki had been transformed from a small coastal village
into a flourishing port city with a high percentage of Christian converts
among its population. The future prospects of both Portuguese traders
and Jesuit missionaries in Japan were bright indeed. Then, in 1 587, with-
out warning or intimation, Hideyoshi declared the “nationalization” of
Nagasaki and ordered the Jesuit missionaries to leave the country within
twenty days. Hideyoshi never fully implemented his decree against the
missionaries, since he feared that it might drive away the Portuguese
traders as well. Yet, the fact that he issued it at all suggests a growing
anti-Christian feeling in Japan's ruling circles, a feeling that was to reach
great intensity several decades later.

The Portuguese and other Europeans, including Spanish, Dutch, and
English, who visited Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries were loosely labeled by the Japanese (in accordance with Chi-
nese practice) as namhan or “southern barbarians,” since they came from
the seas to the south. For practical purposes, however, the so-called
namban culture of this age consisted of the forms of Western technology,
culture, and general knowledge introduced to Japan by the Jesuits.5 By
far the leading center of namban culture was Nagasaki, which remained
strongly under Jesuit and Portuguese influence even after Hideyoshi’s
nationalization of it in 1587.

The Country Unified

145

Among the first things the Portuguese introduced to the Japanese
were Western guns, in particular the muzzle-loading arquebus, a riflelike
weapon, somewhat smaller than the musket, that was preferred by the
Portuguese and the Spanish. The Japanese set about making these guns
immediately and imported as many as possible from Europe. Within ten
years the daimyos were using guns in substantial numbers in battles. It is
interesting to note that this was the very time, the middle of the six-
teenth century, when a military revolution was occurring in Europe be-
cause of the widespread use for the first time of hand-held guns in war-
fare. Astonishing as it may seem, Japan, heretofore a country virtually
unknown to — and certainly unvisited by — Europeans and situated in the
farthest reaches of the world, underwent a similar military revolution
thanks to the introduction of European guns. The leader in this revolu-
tion was Oda Nobunaga, who is credited with having organized the first
major gun unit in a Japanese army.

Nobunaga divided the infantry of his army into three units by
weapons: gunners, bowmen, and spear men. The major problem with the
guns of that day, apart from their inaccuracy, was the time required to
reload them. During the minutes when the gunners were reloading, the
bowmen and spear men had to take up the slack by maintaining the
attack against the enemy. The reloading problem could also be dealt with
by dividing the gunners into groups and having them fire in relay or
volleys. It appears, in fact, that Nobunaga was the first commander in the
world to develop such volley fire. Geoffrey Parker, describing the Battle of
Nagashino in 1 575, in which Nobunaga ’s guns defeated the finest cavalry
in the land (the cavalry of the Takeda family), writes: “The warlord
Nobunaga deployed 3,000 musketeers in ranks in this action, having
trained them to fire in volleys so as to maintain a constant barrage. The
opposing cavalry — ironically of the same Takeda clan which had pio-
neered the use of the gun — was annihilated. The battle-scene in Kuro-
sawa’s film Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) offers a credible reconstruc-
tion, for the action is intended to represent Nagashino.”0 According to
Parker, Europeans did not develop the technique of volley fire until the
1590s, some two decades after the Japanese.

It is often assumed that the Portuguese also influenced the Japanese
in the construction of castles in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries (fig. 42). Certainly this was the great age of castle building in
Japan, but there is little evidence that the Japanese received any direct
Portuguese instruction or aid in the building of these fortresses. Rather,
the castles of the era of unification appear to have evolved as a natural
product of conditions of accelerated warfare and the formation of more
firmly and rationally controlled daimyo domains.

In the early centuries of the medieval age, the samurai had apparently
felt very little need for strong defensive fortifications. Although occasion-

146

The Country Unified

Fig. 42 Himeji Castle (Consulate General of Japan, New \brky

ally a force of warriors would attempt to hold a position against great
odds, medieval armies usually withdrew when the tide of battle turned
against them in order to regroup and fight again another day. In the style
of warfare that prevailed until at least the Onin War, even the occupation
of key cities, such as Kyoto, was seldom regarded as absolutely crucial
from the standpoint of overall strategy. Thus, during the war between the
Northern and Southern courts in the fourteenth century, the Ashikaga
on several occasions temporarily relinquished possession of the capital
to the forces of the Southern Court when it seemed impractical or ex-

The Country Unified

147

cessively difficult to defend it. Fighting in those days was done almost
entirely by the samurai, and few peasants or townsmen were impressed
into military service. Since supplies were readily accessible in the country-
side, moreover, cities were not essential over the short term even for eco-
nomic reasons. Hence Kyoto, until the Onin War, seldom suffered great
physical damage as a direct result of warfare. Armies came and went and
the city continued to function more or less as usual.

The new breed of daimyos who emerged in the age of provincial wars
expanded their domains by stages and at each stage developed new types
of fortifications to meet their military, economic, and administrative
needs. In the early sixteenth century the most common fortress or
“castle” was a kind of wooden stockade built atop a hill, a site selected
solely because of its defensibility. The master, his family, and personal
retinue lived at the base of the hill and used the castle only when attacked.

As daimyos spread their hegemonies over larger territories, they began
to move their castles to level land. Some picked locations with protective
mountains or bodies of water to the rear; but others — particularly the
more successful daimyos from about the time of Nobunaga’s rise — placed
their castles on open land or plains. Daimyos who constructed castles in
settings of the latter type obviously felt sufficiently secure in their posi-
tions as baronial rulers to sacrifice the military advantages of less exposed
terrain in order to make these strongholds the administrative and com-
mercial centers of their domains.

The first true castles, built during the age of unification, were distin-
guishable from earlier fortresses primarily by their massive stone foun-
dations and their general size and grandeur. A Jesuit priest described the
castle that Nobunaga built at Azuchi on the shore of Lake Biwa with
these words of wonder and admiration:

On top of the hill in the middle of the city Nobunaga built his palace and
castle, which as regards architecture, strength, wealth and grandeur may well
be compared with the greatest buildings of Europe. Its strong and well con-
structed surrounding walls of stone are over 60 spans in height and even
higher in many places; inside the walls there are many beautiful and exquisite
houses, all of them decorated with gold and so neat and well fashioned that
they seem to reach the acme of human elegance. And in the middle there is a
sort of tower which they call tenshu and it indeed has a far more noble and
splendid appearance than our towers. It consists of seven floors, all of which,
both inside and out, have been fashioned to a wonderful architectural design.

. . . [Inside], the walls are decorated with designs richly painted in gold and
different colours. Some are painted white with their windows varnished black
according to Japanese usage, and they look extremely beautiful, others are
painted red, others blue, while the uppermost one is entirely gilded.7

Hideyoshi built three castles, one in Kyoto, another at Momoyama
immediately to the south of the capital, and a third (a particularly massive

148

The Country Unified

fortification) at Osaka. Unfortunately, none of the unification-age castles
has survived. Indeed, there are few castles remaining in Japan today, and
all postdate unification. Warfare and natural disasters, combined with the
policy of the Tokugawa shogunate to restrict the possession and repair
of castles, have taken their toll over the centuries. In addition to those
torn down or allowed to decay in Tokugawa times, a number of fortifica-
tions were reduced in the fighting that accompanied the Meiji Restoration
of 1868; and an especially splendid castle at Nagoya was demolished dur-
ing an air attack in World War II.

Although no longer in existence, Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and
Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch
of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momo-
yama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appro-
priate in view of the significance of castles — as represented by these two
historically famous structures — in the general progress, cultural and
otherwise, of these exciting years. For castles served not only as fortifica-
tions but also as centers of urban growth in the form of castle towns and
as the symbols of daimyo authority and material opulence.

Apart from moats and great protective walls of stone, the most con-
spicuous feature of the Japanese castle was the many-storied keep or
donjon (the tenshu mentioned in the passage about Azuchi castle). The
typical keep had white plastered walls and complexly arranged, hipped
and gabled roofs of tile, designed so that each roof was smaller in size
than the one directly below it. Although the keeps were relatively safe
from attack by incendiary missiles, owing to the composition of their
walls and their sloped roofs, they were highly vulnerable to cannon. But
Western-style artillery was not introduced into warfare in Japan until the
late 1580s, shortly before Hideyoshi completed unification. And, in any
case, the keeps of these late sixteenth century Japanese castles were not
primarily designed as last-ditch military strongholds. Rather, they were
intended to symbolize the power and eminence of their masters. Their
exteriors were imposing and their interiors were carefully arranged into
private living quarters, decorated according to the prevailing tastes of the
age. As we shall see, some of the finest artwork of the Momoyama epoch
was done on screens and sliding doors for use and display in castles.

Before examining further the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture,
however, let us return to the foreign and exotic namban culture of the Por-
tuguese traders and Jesuit missionaries that also flourished briefly during
these years.

One of the most noteworthy projects undertaken by Europeans of this
age in Japan was the opening of a Jesuit press. During the period from
1591 until 1610, the Jesuits, using chiefly movable type which they intro-
duced to the Japanese, printed some fifty books in Latin, Portuguese, and
Japanese (in both the romanized and native orthographies). Most of the

The Country Unified

149

Jesuit publications were Christian religious tracts, but some dealt with
language and literature. Among the few examples of literary works that
have been preserved are a Japanese translation of Aesop's Fables and a
rendering into romaji or roman letters of the famous medieval war tale
The Tale of the Heike. The Heike and other Japanese narratives, known
from the records to have been done in romaji at this time, were primarily
intended for the use of missionaries as aids in learning the native
language.

One of the things for which the Jesuit missionaries became famous was
their work in studying the languages of the countries where they prosely-
tized. Of the early Jesuits in Japan who worked in this area, none was
more highly regarded than Joao Rodrigues (1561-1634), who went to
Japan as a youth and spent most of the remainder of his life there. Given
the sobriquet “Rodrigues the Interpreter,” he appears to have attained a
greater command of Japanese than any other European of this age, even
serving on occasion as interpreter for the hegemon Hideyoshi. In addition
to writing a lengthy history of Japan, Rodrigues took the lead in compil-
ing a monumental study in Portuguese of the Japanese language entitled
Art of the Language of Japan (Arte da Lingoa de Iapam). In the opinion of
C. R. Boxer, Rodrigues’ Art may be taken as “the starting point of the
scientific study of Japanese as a language.”8

Another cultural activity in which the Jesuits were prominent was the
introduction of Western pictorial art to Japan in the form of oil painting
and copper engraving. The Jesuits were especially anxious to provide
votive pictures for newly established Christian churches and for individual
converts to Christianity who wished to display them in their homes. So
great was the demand for these pictures that it could not be met solely
by the importation of works from Europe, and the Jesuits were obliged
to instruct Japanese artists in Western-style painting. All indications are
that the Japanese learned the foreign style quickly and soon produced the
desired pictures in more than adequate quantity. Yet, regrettably, the
great bulk of such pictures by Japanese artists, as well as those brought
from Europe, was destroyed in the Christian persecutions of the seven-
teenth century, and we have only a relatively few works remaining from
which to judge Japan’s “Christian art” during and after the period of
unification.

Although much of namban art was either iconographic or religious,
there are extant a number of paintings and engravings done in the West-
ern manner of such secular subjects as European cities, landscapes, and
nonclerical people. Some of the latter are shown in portraitlike poses,
but others are depicted in genre scenes performing everyday activities
of work and leisure. These foreign genre pictures are particularly inter-
esting because, as we shall see, it was about this time that the Japanese
evolved a new style of genre painting of their own, a style that led ulti-

150

The Country Unified

mately to the famous ukiyo-e or “floating world” pictures of the Toku-
gawa period.

One kind of Japanese genre painting that dates from the late sixteenth
century is the so-called namban screen. Although designated as namban
because they depict Europeans in Japan, these screens are actually the
creations of Japanese artists working entirely within the native tradition
of painting.

The namban screens commonly come in pairs and are often very sim-
ilar in subject matter, one showing the departure of the Portuguese car-
rack (great ship) from Goa or Macao and the other its arrival at Naga-
saki (Fig. 43) . In the latter, the passengers are usually shown proceeding
from the shore toward town, where they mingle with people, both Japa-
nese and Europeans, who have come to greet them. The Portuguese
traders are drawn with exceedingly small heads, thin legs, and huge pan-
taloons, and the Jesuits are shown attired in flowing black clerical robes.
In some of the namban screens, the Portuguese are accompanied by black
servants (who greatly delighted the Japanese) and are leading such ani-
mals as Arabian horses, deer, peacocks, and elephants. Also frequently
shown in these screens are Christian churches, constructed in the archi-
tectural style of Buddhist temple buildings.

It is impossible to date these rather stereotyped namban screens pre-
cisely, although most of them were probably painted in the early or mid-
1590s when the fad for Western things was at its height in Japan. Hide-
yoshi had established his military headquarters near Nagasaki for the
invasion of Korea in 1592, and this proximity aroused a new curiosity
about the foreigners and their ways among Japan’s samurai leaders. The
Jesuits sought to capitalize on such curiosity in the hope of gaining
better understanding and offsetting Hideyoshi’s anti-Christian acts of
recent years. They were fortunate to have available an exceptional “public
relations” group of four Japanese Christians from Kyushu who had gone
as youths in 1 582 on a mission to Europe where they had visited Pope
Gregory XIII in Rome. Returning in 1590, these young men possessed
not only first-hand knowledge of Europe but also various mementos of
their trip, such as artworks, mechanical devices, and maps.

Hideyoshi and his advisers, then planning their invasion of Korea,
were much impressed by the foreign maps and techniques of cartography;
and the making of maps, many of them painted in bright colors on fold-
ing screens and even fans, became as popular about this time as the pro-
duction of the namban pictures showing the arrival of the Portuguese
great ship. Most of these namban maps were depictions either of the world
or of Japan alone, and, apart from a distorted rendering in the world
maps of the Americas and the northern and northeastern regions of Asia,
they appear to be respectably accurate. The world maps, moreover, make
manifestly clear by the varying perspectives from which they were drawn

Fig. 43 Namban (“southern barbarian”) screen showing the arrival of the Portuguese great ship at Nagasaki (Cleveland Museum of Art)

152

The Country Unified

that the earth is round (although the Jesuits in their preaching refused to
endorse the still heretical Copernican theory of earthly rotation around
the sun).

The most frivolous aspect of the craze for things Western in the 1590s
was the aping by Japanese, including Hideyoshi himself, of the Portu-
guese style of dress and personal adornment. The degree to which these
became fashionable can be seen in a letter written by a Jesuit father about
this time:

Quambacudono (i.e., the Kwambaku, Toyotomi Hideyoshi) has become so
enamored of Portuguese dress and costume that he and his retainers fre-
quently wear this apparel, as do all the other lords of Japan, even the gentiles,
with rosaries of driftwood on the breast above all their clothing, and with a
crucifix at their side, or hanging from the waist, and sometimes even with
kerchiefs in their hands; some of them are so curious that they learn by rote
the litanies of Pater Noster and Ave Maria and go along praying in the streets,
not in mockery or scorn of the Christians, but simply for gallantry, or
because they think it is a good thing and one which will help them to achieve
prosperity in worldly things. In this way they order oval-shaped pendants to
be made containing reliques of the images of Our Lord and Our Lady
painted on glass at great cost.Q

But none of the interests the Japanese displayed in nambati culture and
Portuguese styles was, as we shall see, able to stem the mounting tide of
anti-Christian sentiment that led in the seventeenth century to severe per-
secutions and, finally, to the expulsion of foreigners and adoption of a
national seclusion policy. Although the Dutch were allowed to trade at
Nagasaki, Christianity and Western ways were in general so thoroughly
rooted out that few traces of nambati culture were to be found in Japan
after about the mid-seventeenth century. There remained some things,
like firearms, tobacco, and eyeglasses, and a few Portuguese words, such
as pan (bread), karuta (playing card), and kappa (a straw cape used as a
raincoat), to attest to the fact that the Jesuits and their patrons had really
been in Japan for nearly a hundred years. Otherwise, their presence and
cultural influence were to a remarkable extent expunged from the mem-
ory of the Japanese until modern times.

Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured
the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic
culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of
painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best
known and most successful were the Kano, a school that was maintained
by lineal and adopted descendants from medieval until modern times.

The origins of the Kano school can be traced from Masanobu (1434-
1530), a member of a samurai house who purportedly studied under
Shubun. Masanobu accepted the post, first declined by Sesshu, of official

The Country Unified

153

artist to the Ashikaga shogunate in the kanga or Chinese manner of Sung
and Yuan monochrome painting. He thus established the Kano as a line
of professional painters who worked on commission to meet the demands
of their warrior patrons.

Although Masanobu founded the Kano school, it was his son and suc-
cessor, Motonobu (1476-1559), who was most responsible for defining
its character and course of development. Motonobu was by all accounts
a true eclectic. He continued the Kano tradition of kanga monochrome
painting, which still dominated the attention of nearly all Japanese artists
until well into the sixteenth century; but Motonobu also made free use
of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the
Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture
scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Yamato style had declined in early Muromachi times with the
renewal of trade with the continent and the growing (and finally consum-
ing) interest of Japanese artists, especially members of the Zen priest-
hood, in Chinese monochrome work. A line of painters called the Tosa
school, who were engaged as official artists by the imperial court just
as the Kano were employed by the shogunate, formally sustained the
Yamato tradition throughout the Muromachi period. But the Tosa artists
produced little work of distinction, and it was not until Kano Motonobu
eclectically blended the Yamato and kanga styles that indigenous achieve-
ments in the development of painting were restored to the mainstream of
artwork in Japan. As if formalistically to seal the merger of the native and
foreign ways of painting, Motonobu married the daughter of Tosa Mitsu-
nobu (dates unknown), probably the best of his school in the Muromachi
period and the person most responsible for the modest revival of Tosa
painting about Motonobu’s time.

The greatest representative of the Kano school in the Momoyama
epoch was Kano Eitoku (1543-90), who, after dissolution of the Ashikaga
shogunate in 1573, was successively employed by the new military hege-
mons, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. It was a cardinal event in the history of
Japanese art when Eitoku was invited by Nobunaga, in 1576, to deco-
rate the interior of his new castle at Azuchi. Although Azuchi Castle no
longer stands, we know from the chronicles the great variety of paintings
in both monochrome and color it contained, including pictures of flowers,
trees, birds, rocks, dragons, phoenixes, Buddhist themes, and Chinese
sages.10

Probably no other people has sought more assiduously than the Japa-
nese to adapt their art — most notably painting — to developments in
domestic architecture. From at least the Heian period on, much of Japa-
nese secular painting had been done on folding screens and sliding doors,
the chief devices used for the partitioning of space in the mansions of the
Heian aristocracy. Even with the transition from the shinden to the shoiti

154

The Country Unified

style of architecture in the Muromachi period, painting was readily ad-
justed to meet the additional decorative needs of the shoin room through
the production in greater numbers of vertical hanging scrolls (kakemono)
for display in the new alcoves or tokonoma. But it was not until the
Momoyama epoch that the claims of architecture most conspicuously
influenced the course of painting in Japan. To decorate the larger wall
spaces, sliding doors, and screens of the living quarters of the typical
Momoyama castle, the Kano and other contemporary painters were
forced to create a new, monumental style of art.

The practice of painting on folding screens (which in Japan was also
adapted to the fusuma- type sliding doors) was originally derived from
China, and a great number of Chinese-style screen paintings have been
preserved from the eighth century in the Shosoin at Nara. But with the
development of Zen-inspired monochrome painting in the Sung period,
Chinese artists abandoned the folding screen as a medium for their work.
These artists, who were chiefly members of the literati class, saw that the
monochrome style of landscape painting could more effectively be ren-
dered on smaller formats, such as hanging scrolls, and by and large they
left the decorating of screens to house painters and other lower-class arti-
sans. In medieval Japan, on the other hand, the folding screen remained
an extremely popular format for art among both the courtier and warrior
aristocracies, and even the most prominent landscape painters, including
Shubun, were obliged to do much of their work on the larger areas of
screen panels. This presented considerable difficulty, since the typical
subtlety and suggestiveness of landscapes in ink were apt to appear as
signs of weakness or insipidity on, say, a six-panel screen that measured
some five feet in height and perhaps twelve feet in width.

Sesshu partly solved the problem of painting monochrome landscapes
on large surfaces by employing an exceptionally strong brush stroke, a
technique that was also adopted by the artists of the Kano school. In
addition, the Kano turned increasingly from the painting of landscapes
to flowers and birds, which provided them greater opportunity for close-
up detailing and the decorative placement of objects. Although Sesshu
and other Muromachi artists had earlier done scenes of flowers and birds
on screens, it was the Kano and their fellowr painters of the Momoyama
epoch wTho most fully exploited this traditional subject category of Chi-
nese art.

But what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this
that the Kano artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to
their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that
these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink
and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most character-
istic works of Momoyama art. It has been hypothesized that this ex-
tremely free use of gold leaf, which had been known but seldom em-

The Country Unified

155

ployed by artists of the Muromachi period, was partly dictated by the
need for greater illumination in the dimly lit reception halls of Momo-
yama castles. In any case, there could hardly be a more striking contrast
between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition
from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blaz-
ing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of
early modern times. The Kano and other Momoyama artists continued
also to paint in black and white, but their greatest and most original con-
tribution to Japanese art was their heroic work in color done on screens.

Many Momoyama screens are unsigned, and it is only from an anal-
ysis of their styles or from contemporary accounts that the artists who
did them can with any certainty be identified. The most likely reason for
this anonymity is that Momoyama screen painters often worked in teams,
and no doubt it was regarded as inappropriate for a single individual to
take credit for a picture done jointly by affixing his personal signature or
seal to it. Tradition has it that when Kano Eitoku did large projects, like
the decoration of Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi, he simply sketched in the
outlines of pictures — often using a brush that was like a large straw broom
— and left the detailing to his assistants.

Momoyama screen painting developed into a fully decorative style of
art in which overall design and the placement of objects were of para-
mount importance. The boldness with which the Momoyama masters
executed their works is readily observable in Kano Eitoku ’s composition
of a twisting, gnarled cypress tree set against a background of rocks, azure
water, and gold-leaf clouds. Later decorative artists of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries were to scale down Eitoku’s handling of
objects and soften his use of color. But they lived in an age when peace
and stability were taken for granted in Japan, whereas Eitoku and his con-
temporaries displayed in their art the tremendous, if often impetuous,
energy of the epic Momoyama years of unification (fig. 44).

Fig. 44 Kano Sansetsu’s “Aged Plum,” a representative work of the decorative
screen painting of the Momoyama epoch (The Metropolitan Museum of Art , The
Harry G . C. Packard Collection of Asian Art)

156

The Country Unified

Another major artist of the Momoyama epoch was Hasegawa Tohaku
(1539-1610). Like all Momoyama painters, Tohaku worked in a variety
of styles, including the colorful decorative manner that was so closely
associated with his rivals, Eitoku and the Kano school. He had a special
fondness, however, for the monochrome art of the Muromachi masters
and in fact declared himself to be the true successor to the tradition of
Sesshu. In several of his major works, including the picture of pine trees
on a pair of six-panel screens, Tohaku demonstrated how a new and
imaginative approach to the use of monochrome on large areas could
produce extremely satisfying results (fig. 45). His clusters of pine trees,
presented without supporting motifs in either the foreground or back-
ground, do not seem at all inadequate for the decoration of these multi-
paneled screens. Rather, they strikingly enhance, in the best Zen-like
tradition, the emptiness of the remainder of the screens’ surface.

Apart from the decorative style, the most significant art form to evolve
during the Momoyama epoch was genre painting. Genre scenes — that
is, portrayals of people in their everyday activities — can be found in
Yamato pictures from the Heian period on and are particularly common

Fig. 45 Pine Trees Screen by Hasegawa Tohaku (Tokyo National Museum)

The Country Unified

157

in the later horizontal scrolls of the medieval era. Yet, for the most part,
the genre scenes in these scrolls have been placed within the context of
running narratives and were not intended to stand alone as depictions of
how people of the age characteristically behaved. A major exception is a
scroll reputedly painted at the end of the Heian period (although only
copies done many centuries later in the manner of the original survive
today) entitled “Important Events of the Year” (nenju-gydji) , which
shows Heian aristocrats in the cycle of elegant activities that filled their
social calendars. Because the “Important Events” scroll deals only with
courtiers, however, its value as social history is limited. True genre art,
picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the
sixteenth century.

The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work,
dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (raku-
chii-rakugai zu). Done on a pair of six-panel screens, it provides a bird’s-
eye, panoramic scene of the capital and its environs. Temples, mansions
of the elite, mountains, and other famous points of interest in and about
the city are clearly distinguishable, and people can be seen everywhere,
promenading on the streets, relaxing in courtyards, visiting temples,
carrying goods for sale and delivery, and attending the innumerable shops
and stalls that stretch in rows along the busy thoroughfares. Because of
the picture’s obvious stress on the bustling commercial life of the city, a
number of scholars have speculated that it was either produced or
commissioned by merchants anxious to commemorate the crucial
role of trade in the rebuilding of the capital after the devastation of the
Onin War.

Many other pictures on the theme of “Views Inside and Outside
Kyoto,” including a particularly detailed one by Kano Eitoku, were
produced during the following two centuries. In addition to their artistic
merits, these pictures are invaluable records of the changing features of
the ancient capital in an age (at least until 1600) when it was more than
ever the vital administrative as well as cultural center of the country
(fig. 46)

With the coming of the Momoyama epoch and the general reestab-
lishment of tranquility in the land, genre artists turned increasingly to
studies of people at leisure and in the pursuit of pleasure rather than
engaged simply in daily chores or as members of a passing scene (as in
the pictures of “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto”). Among the great
variety of subjects shown in genre works of the Momoyama epoch are
picnics, flower-viewing excursions, festivals, horse races, dancing, actors
of the popular theatre (kabuki)y and women of the pleasure quarters. Of
these, the kabuki actors and courtesans came especially to attract the
attention of artists of the seventeenth-century urban scene, a clear indi-
cation of the emergence among them of what may be called a spirit of
bourgeois or popular humanism.

The Country Unified

159

Changing techniques in the handling of subjects also indicated the
growing humanistic concerns of genre artists of this age. From distant,
elevated perspectives that encompassed wide vistas and often huge
throngs of people, they gradually shifted to intimate portrayals of small
groups of men and women — or even of single individuals — viewed directly
from close range. Moreover, by eliminating settings entirely and using
stark gold-leaf backgrounds, these late Momoyama and early Tokugawa
period genre artists presented their subjects, most of whom were deni-
zens of the demimonde, as directly and candidly as possible.

Although it differs from many of the others, which are frankly erotic,
one of the finest of these portrait-type genre works of the Momoyama
epoch is the so-called Matsuura Screen (fig. 47). It depicts eighteen
women engaged in various casual activities and pastimes, some of which
reveal the special fashions and fads of the day. Tw'O women, for example,
are playing cards, a game introduced by the Portuguese; another accepts
from a companion a long-stemmed pipe containing tobacco, which was

Fig. 47 Matsuura Screen (Museum Yamato Bunkakan)

160

The Country Unified

also brought to Japan by Westerners in the sixteenth century; and still
another woman plucks the samisen , a three-stringed, banjo-like musical
instrument of the Ryukyus that first became popular in Japan around
the 1590s. Apart from the activities in which its subjects are engaged,
the Matsuura Screen is notable for at least two reasons: first, for the
skillful manner in which the artist has arranged his women, so that they
strike an exceptionally varied and rhythmically interlocking series of
poses; and second, for the dazzlingly patterned kimonos the women are
wearing. Some authorities have conjectured, on the basis of the studied
placement of the figures and the particularly flat appearance of their
attire, almost as though it consisted of pieces of material pasted onto the
surface of the picture, that the Matsuura Screen was actually produced
as an advertisement or a merchant’s display poster. In any event, it
reveals the great skill that artists of this age were capable of in handling
the genre-type portraits that were to serve as forerunners of the famous
“pictures of the floating world” (to be discussed in the next chapter).

One of the most prominent people of the Momoyama cultural scene
was the noted tea master and arbiter of taste, Sen no Rikyu (1521-91).
Descended from a Sakai merchant house, Rikyu became a devoted
practitioner of the classical tea ceremony. The putative founder of this
ceremony, as noted in the last chapter, was Shuko, a man of the Higashi-
yama epoch who died in 1502. During the sixteenth century the cere-
mony was further developed as wabicha , or tea (cha) based on the aes-
thetic of zuabi. Haga Koshiro defines zvabi as comprising three kinds of
beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty;
and an austere, stark beauty.

Sen no Rikyu himself chose to illustrate the meaning of zvabi by citing
a poem by the Heian-period court poet Fujiwara no Ietaka (1 158-1237):

To those who wait
Only for flowers,

Show them a spring
Of grass amid the snow
In a mountain village.13

Professor Haga’s analysis of this poem is itself a noteworthy contribu-
tion to our understanding of wabi:

We can imagine a mountain village in the depths of winter when the seven
wild grasses of autumn have withered and the brilliant scarlet leaves have
scattered. It is a lonely, cold, and desolate world, a world that is even more
deeply steeped in the emptiness of non-being than that of “a bayside reed
hovel in the autumn dusk.” At first glance this may seem like a cold, withered
world at the very extremity of yin. It is not, of course, simply a world of
death. As proof, we have these lines: “When spring comes it turns to bright-
ness and amid the snow fresh grass sprouts, here two there three blades at a

The Country Unified

161

time.” This is truly “the merest tinge of yang at the extremity of yin” Ietaka
expressed this notion as a “spring of grass amid the snow.” And Rikyu found
in it the perfect image of zvabi. Thus Rikyu’s wabi , viewed externally, is im-
poverished, cold, and withered. At the same time, internally, it has a beauty
which brims with vitality. While it may appear to be the faded beauty of the
passive recluse, or the remnant beauty of old age, it has within it the beauty
of non-being, latent with unlimited energy and change.12

Sen no Rikyu is noted for having taken the tea ceremony to its farthest
extreme. Shuko had suggested that the ceremony be held in a small
room, preferably four and a half mats in size, and that it be conducted
with a minimum of utensils and decorative accessories (fig. 48). Later
wabicha masters went so far as to arrange their teahouses to appear like
the huts of the most humble of farmers, building them with mud walls
and unpainted wood, and eliminating all decoration save a single display
of flowers or calligraphy in the tokonoma. But Rikyu achieved the ulti-
mate in wabicha settings by adopting as his preferred teahouse a stark
hut of only two mats in size, which could at most accommodate two or
three people in one gathering.

162

The Country Unified

The rise of Rikyu was in one respect an indication of the expanded
influence, in cultural as well as commercial matters, of the merchant class
of the Momoyama epoch. Rikyu, who served both Nobunaga and Hide-
yoshi, appears indeed as a herald of the coming age of bourgeois culture
that flourished under the Tokugawa after 1600. Yet, despite his bour-
geois background, Rikyu remained essentially a medieval man. He was
not reluctant to take advantage of the new opportunities for social and
political advancement that the times presented; but in the realm of cul-
ture, Rikyu proved to be a necessary restraining force against the exces-
sive exuberance of the Momoyama spirit.

Momoyama screen art, although bold and showy, was saved from be-
coming vulgar by its firm grounding in the earlier, more traditional kanga
and Yamato styles of painting. The tea ceremony, on the other hand,
was greatly threatened by the urge to ostentation it aroused among the
newly risen military leaders of the age of unification. In their desire to
demonstrate their cultural as well as martial grandeur, these swashbuck-
ling chieftains went to extravagant lengths to engage specialists in the
“way of tea” and to collect rare and unusual tea utensils and accessories.
They frequently purchased these at astronomical prices and greatly
coveted them. One daimyo, Matsunaga Hisahide (1510-77), is said on a
certain occasion to have saved his life by presenting Nobunaga with a
priceless tea caddy. Some years later, after Hisahide had joined a plot
against Nobunaga and was faced with imminent destruction, he purport-
edly smashed to bits another highly treasured piece, a kettle, to prevent
its falling into his adversary’s hands.

When Nobunaga in his march to power imposed his control over the
city of Sakai, then the main port in the lucrative foreign trade with China,
he acquired a number of valuable tea pieces from the collections of
wealthy Sakai merchants and took into his service several of the better
known tea masters of the city, including Sen no Rikyu. In addition to hav-
ing these masters design the tearoom for his castle at Azuchi, Nobunaga
used them to preside over the frequent and elaborate tea parties he held.
It became his custom, moreover, to bestow prized tea utensils on his
lieutenants for meritorious service; and he even went so far as to make
the right of these men to hold formal tea parties a distinction that he
alone could bestow. It is recorded that Hideyoshi, when granted this
honor in 1578 after an important military victory, was overcome with
gratitude toward Nobunaga.

Upon his succession to national overlordship, Hideyoshi displayed an
especially strong fondness for mammoth social affairs and is particularly
remembered for the great tea party he held at the Kitano Shrine in Kyoto
in 1587. The party was scheduled to last for ten days, weather permitting,
and everyone, from courtiers and daimyos to townsmen and peasants and
even foreigners, was invited. Guests were required only to bring a few

The Country Unified

163

utensils to serve themselves and mats to sit on. An outbreak of fighting
in Kyushu brought cancellation of the party after only one day; yet it
seems to have been thoroughly enjoyed by the great throng of people who
attended. Hideyoshi put many of his most valued tea pieces on display
and, along with Rikyu and two other tea masters from Sakai, personally
served a large number of the assembled guests.

Despite his penchant for the grandiose, Hideyoshi was also a fond ad-
mirer of wabicha and he and Rikyu became intimate companions. As a
result, Rikyu was one of the most influential people in Japanese ruling
circles during the late 1580s. Then, suddenly, disaster struck. In 1591,
for reasons that remain to this day obscure, Hideyoshi ordered his dis-
tinguished tea master to commit suicide. Hideyoshi, who was noted for
his impetuosity and who was fully capable of ghastly and capricious acts
of tyranny, may have imposed this punishment for some personal slight
or because he genuinely feared the power Rikyu had acquired. It is said
that Hideyoshi later much lamented having caused the tea master’s death.
At any rate, the passing of Sen no Rikyu removed from Japan’s cultural
scene the last great medieval figure and heralded the advent of the al-
ready rapidly approaching early modern age.

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

The great peace of more than two and a half centuries that followed the
founding of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1600 was made possible largely
by the policy of national seclusion which the shogunate adopted during
the late 1630s. To many historians this policy, carried out amid fearful
persecutions of both native and foreign Christians, has appeared as an
arbitrary and extraordinarily reactionary measure whereby the Tokugawa,
in order to preserve their national hegemony, terminated a lively century
of intercourse with the countries of western Europe and reinstituted harsh
and repressive feudal controls over Japan.

The seclusion policy, which was set in place by a series of edicts issued
between 1633 and 1636, forbade Japanese to leave Japan and severely re-
stated Japan's relations with other countries, both European and East
Asian. Recent scholars, noting the variety of trade and, in some cases,
diplomatic relations that were still maintained — albeit on a very limited
scale — with Holland (trade), China (trade), Korea (trade and diplomatic
relations), and the Ryukyus (trade and diplomatic relations) have ques-
tioned whether the Tokugawa shogunate actually intended to “seclude”
Japan from the rest of the world.1 The most frequently used term for the
seclusion policy, sakoku , “closed (literally, ‘chained’) country,” certainly
suggests a seclusive intent. But, as we will see, this term was not coined
until the early nineteenth century, when the West had begun to intrude
once more upon Japan. Tokugawa leaders at that time seized upon the
term as descriptive of what they believed had always been an immutable
“closed country” policy that prohibited further expansion of relations
with foreign countries, in particular those of the West. But at the time of
its inception in the seventeenth century, the seclusion policy was probably
intended more to establish a new international order in East Asia, with
Japan at its center, than to seal the country off permanently from all but
minimal ties with the outside world.

Yet the fact remains that the seclusion policy did minimize foreign rela-
tions, especially with Europe. Of Europeans, only the Dutch were allowed
to continue trading with Japan, and from 1 640 on their activities were re-
stricted to a small, artificial island in Nagasaki harbor called Deshima (or

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

165

Dejima). During the Tokugawa period, there were usually seven or eight
officials at the Dutch compound on this island. A Dutch contingent jour-
neyed each year to Edo to meet with shogunate officials;2 otherwise the
Dutch were almost entirely sealed off from contact with the Japanese
except for the few who served as trading agents and interpreters.

It has been held that the Japanese paid a tremendous price in progress
by cutting themselves off from the West just as it was entering fully into
its great age of technological and scientific advancements. No doubt this
is in some measure true. Yet, we cannot simply assume that, in the ab-
sence of the Tokugawa seclusion policy, Japan would have moved steadily
or smoothly into more intimate relations with the West. To the Westerners,
Japan still lay at the farthest extremity of the known world; and quite
possibly the Western trade of this age with Japan had already passed its
zenith. Japan, moreover, was not alone in acting as it did, but was only
one of several countries of the Far East — including China, Korea, and
Vietnam — that effectively minimized or restricted trade and cultural ties
with the West during the seventeenth century. In their first major en-
counter, the East as a whole thus managed to hold the West at arm’s
length. Two centuries later when the West, having undergone its indus-
trial revolution, sought once more to intrude into the Far East, its impetus
was such that it could not be stopped by unilateral seclusion or restriction
policies.

The Tokugawa, of course, did not conceive of participating in a histor-
ical movement by which the East rejected the West. They pursued their
seclusion policy for essentially two reasons: first, the fear, smoldering
since Hideyoshi’s day, that Christianity was by its nature antithetical to
Japan’s traditional social order and religious beliefs; and second, the ap-
prehension that the daimyos of western Japan, who had been the leading
opponents of the Tokugawa before the battle of Sekigahara, might ally
themselves with the Europeans and attempt to overthrow the Edo regime.
Although it is questionable how realistic the Tokugawa concern over
Christianity was, there can be no doubt that the presence in Kyushu ports
of Europeans capable of providing arms and other military supplies to the
western daimyos was a very real threat to national peace. Short of seeking
to assert more complete military overlordship of the country than had
been achieved at Sekigahara, especially in the western provinces, the
Tokugawa actually had no practical alternative other than to impose some
sort of seclusion policy if they wished to ensure the security of their
regime.

As we saw in the last chapter, Hideyoshi gave a forewarning of the per-
secution of Christians in 1587 when he abruptly ordered all missionaries
to leave Japan. Although the order was not strictly enforced, it was never
rescinded; and ten years later, in 1597, Hideyoshi struck with fury against
a group of missionaries and their followers and thus inaugurated some

166

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

four decades of persecutions that led to the virtual extirpation of Chris-
tianity from Japan. One of the things that lay behind the 1597 incident
was an ugly rivalry between the Jesuit missionaries, supported by the Por-
tuguese, and the Franciscans, who came to Japan in the company of the
Spanish (via Manila) in the 1580s. Whereas the Jesuits paid great atten-
tion to securing converts from among the ruling samurai class, the mendi-
cant Franciscans devoted their efforts primarily to winning over the poor
and lowly. And while the Jesuits regarded themselves as an elite, the Fran-
ciscans took pride in flaunting their humility and self-imposed poverty.

In 1 596, at the height of the Jesuit-Franciscan rivalry, a Spanish gal-
leon was shipwrecked on Shikoku Island and its cargo confiscated by
Hideyoshi ’s officials. Evidently the pilot of the galleon, angered by the
loss of the cargo, warned the Japanese officials that military conquest by
Spain would soon follow based on the spy work being done by the Fran-
ciscans in Japan. The Franciscan version of the story was that the Jesuits,
not the pilot, concocted the story about spying and conquest. In any case,
Hideyoshi promptly ordered the rounding up of Franciscan missionaries
for execution. Six missionaries of the central provinces were arrested and
they, along with twenty of their Japanese converts, were paraded to Naga-
saki, where, early in 1 597, they were crucified and became the first Chris-
tian martyrs in Japan.

Hideyoshi died in 1598 and Tokugawa Ieyasu withheld attacking
Christianity because of his desire to increase trade with the Europeans,
especially the Dutch and English, who arrived in Japan in 1600. But in
1614 the Tokugawa chieftain, possibly influenced by reports from the
Dutch and English Protestants that Catholic missionaries were engaged
in subversion, issued an edict strictly banning Christianity. Thereupon
began the period of mass persecutions that took the lives of some five to
six thousand European and Japanese Christians before it subsided about
1640.

The records will never enable us fully to fathom the conflicting emo-
tions of persecutors and persecuted during this grim phase of Japanese
history. But for the interested reader there is an engrossing novel on the
subject: Silence (Chinmoku) , by the contemporary Catholic writer Endo
Shusaku (1923-96). Silence is based on the true story of a Portuguese
priest, Christovao Ferreira, who apostatized at Nagasaki in 1633. It is a
fictional account of how two other priests, who had been Ferreira’s dis-
ciples, made their way secretly to Japan to learn the truth about the apos-
tasy. In the book the priests, after being sheltered by Japanese Christian
villagers in Kyushu, are forced to separate, and what follows is essentially
the story of one of them, Sebastian Rodrigues. It relates how Rodrigues
eventually finds Ferreira and how he, too, is driven to apostatize.

Rodrigues first confronts the crisis of faith that leads to his apostasy
when, after witnessing the brutal martyrdom of several of the Kyushu vil-

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

167

lagers, he is asked by another villager, Kichijiro (who is actually an in-
former), what the Japanese Christians have done to deserve this punish-
ment from God:

I suppose I [Rodrigues] should simply cast from my mind these meaningless
words of the coward; yet why does his plaintive voice pierce my breast with all
the pain of a sharp needle? Why has Our Lord imposed this torture and this
persecution on poor Japanese peasants? No, Kichijiro was trying to express
something different, something even more sickening. The silence of God.
Already twenty years have passed since the persecution broke out; the black
soil of Japan has been filled with the lament of so many Christians; the red
blood of priests has flowed profusely; the walls of the churches have fallen
down; and in the face of this terrible and merciless sacrifice offered up to
Him, God has remained silent. This was the problem that lay behind the
plaintive question of Kichijiro.3

Betrayed by Kichijiro, Rodrigues is seized by the shogunate authorities
and is accusingly told by one of them that, although he may have come to
Japan to save souls, in fact it is Japanese “souls” that are dying for him:

And whenever a [European priest] is captured it is Japanese blood that will
flow. How many times have I told you that it is the Japanese who have to die
for your selfish dream. It is time to leave us in peace.4

In addition to God’s silence, Endo’s book deals also with the great
issue of how the Japanese adopt or reject elements of foreign cultures.
Rodrigues’s inquisitors, for example, inform us that even when the Japa-
nese of the late sixteenth century seemed to be accepting Christianity,
they were actually transforming the Christian God into a deity of their
own, a deity compatible with their religious traditions. Silence is an im-
portant intellectual inquiry into cultural borrowing as a major phenom-
enon in Japanese history.

The Tokugawa held approximately one-quarter of the agricultural land
of Japan. In addition, they directly administered a number of the major
cities, including Kyoto, Osaka, and Nagasaki, as well as certain important
mining sites. The remainder of the country was divided into the domains
or han of the daimyos. During the Tokugawa period there were two prin-
cipal kinds of territorial lords: hereditary (fudai) daimyos, who had
pledged personal loyalty to the Tokugawa before Sekigahara and were
raised to daimyo status after this great victory; and “outside” (tozama)
daimyos, who had been peers of the Tokugawa family head before 1600
and, whether friends or foes at Sekigahara, submitted to him only after
he became national hegemon. Because of their long-standing allegiance
to the Tokugawa, the fudai daimyos were allowed to serve in the shogunal
government; the tozama daimyos, on the other hand, were barred from all
participation in the ruling affairs of Edo.

168

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

In theory, the daimyos remained autonomous rulers of the han. In
practice, the shogunate not only dictated rules of conduct for them but
also severely restricted their freedom of action. Daimyos, for example,
were not allowed to marry or to repair castles in the domains without per-
mission of the shogunate. Moreover, especially during the first century of
Tokugawa rule, the daimyos were frequently shifted from one domain to
another or were deprived of their domains entirely for various acts pro-
hibited by the shogunate. But the most important measure by which the
Tokugawa controlled the daimyos was the “alternate attendance” (sankin
koiai) system, implemented between 1635 and 1642, which required the
daimyos to spend every other year in attendance at the shogunate court
in Edo (half the daimyos were in Edo one year and the other half were
there the next year) and to leave their wives and children behind when-
ever they returned to their domains. In addition to discouraging any
separatist or other seditious thoughts, the alternate attendance system
placed a heavy financial burden on the daimyos that further reduced the
feasibility of their opposing the shogunate.

Although intended primarily to control the daimyos, the alternate
attendance system had other, far-reaching effects, not all of which could
have been foreseen by the shogunate. The rapid and vast flow of war-
riors, their families and servants, and countless artisans, merchants, and
others into Edo soon swelled its population to enormous size, perhaps
as many as a million, making it one of the largest cities in the world.
Meanwhile, the constant shuttling back and forth of daimyo retinues —
some numbering in the thousands — from domains to Edo and back con-
tributed greatly to the development of transportation facilities throughout
the country. It also proved a great stimulus to the expansion of com-
merce, since provisioning the retinues and providing for their needs while
on the road became big business.

The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in
the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of
a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their fol-
lowers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the
disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and,
ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.5 They also fostered
the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions,
and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.

Tokugawa society was officially divided into four classes: samurai,
peasants, artisans, and merchants. The main social cleavage, however,
was between the ruling samurai class — whose members, from Hideyoshi’s
time on, had been called upon to leave the countryside (if they had not
already done so) and take up residence in the castle towns and cities —
and the commoners. The samurai received fixed annual stipends based
on the rice harvest of their former fiefs and enjoyed a variety of special

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

169

privileges, including the exclusive right to wear swords and to cut down
on the spot any commoners who offended them.

During the age of provincial wars there had been much social mobility
among warriors. By their wits and fighting prowess alone, many men,
including some originally from the peasant and merchant classes, rose
from obscure positions to high levels of military command. Saito Dosan
(1494-1556), for example, started as an oil merchant but eventually be-
came daimyo of Mino province, marrying his daughter to Nobunaga; and
Hideyoshi, as we have seen, made the unprecedentedly spectacular climb
from peasant to national hegemon. Determined to prevent the kind of
social upheaval that had made possible the careers of men like Dosan and
Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa instituted a rigid status system among warriors.
This system, which prescribed distinctions of the most minute kind for
all manner of things, including style of residence, type of clothing, form
of transportation, size of retinue, value of gifts given and received, and
even, in the case of daimyos, seating positions at the shogun’s court in
Edo castle, was intended to lock all samurai into place on a social hier-
archy that denied the possibility of anyone’s rise or fall.

Because they were primary producers of food, the peasants were hon-
ored with second place in the official social ordering. But as Sir George
Sansom has noted, “[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agri-
culture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was
one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely
self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion
of their farming yields — on average, perhaps 50 percent or more — to the
samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants
toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was
manifested in countless peasant rebellions which, although they never
seriously threatened the daimyo domains, much less the shogunate it-
self, proved increasingly vexatious to the samurai authorities, who were
often obliged to accede to peasant demands.

Along with the upper strata of the samurai class, the socially despised
artisans and merchants — known collectively as chonin or townsmen —
enjoyed the greatest prosperity in Tokugawa times. Although in the long
run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Toku-
gawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the
inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that
made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially dur-
ing the first century of shogunate rule. Agricultural productivity, for
example, increased markedly in the seventeenth century; transportation
and communication facilities, benefiting in particular from the alternate
attendance system, were extensively improved; urban populations in the
key administrative and trading centers of the country, beginning with
Edo, rose dramatically; and commerce, stimulated especially by the alter-

170

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

nate attendance system and a sharp expansion in the use of money,
spread at a rate that would have been inconceivable a century earlier
when it had been confined mainly to the central provinces and the for-
eign entry ports of Kyushu.

It is ironic that the prosperity of the Tokugawa period most greatly
benefited that class, the townsmen, that the authorities had emphatically
relegated to the bottom of the social scale. Yet this was inevitable. Both
samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agri-
culture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of
endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could
adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from
the economic growth of the age. We should not be surprised, therefore,
to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached
its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth
and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku
culture wrere the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the w'oodblock
print), and prose fiction, all of which, while drawing heavily on Japan’s
aristocratic cultural tradition, evolved as distinctly popular, bourgeois
forms of art.

Before turning to the chbnin arts, however, let us look first at the de-
velopment of Confucianism during the early Tokugawa period inasmuch
as this most Chinese of creeds set much of the intellectual tone for the
period. The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from
the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millen-
nium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until
the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any
great zeal.

One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval
to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor
of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit. The military potential and
much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects
had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late six-
teenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the
daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japa-
nese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of
some.

The vigorous and colorful outburst of artistic creativity in the Momo-
yama epoch was the first major reaction to the gloom of medievalism.
With the advent of the Tokugawa period, this reaction spread to the in-
tellectual field and stimulated a great Confucian revival. Interestingly, as
we observed in an earlier chapter, it was the Buddhist church — and espe-
cially the Zen sect — that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian
studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least
the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

171

Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of
research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa
period was ultimately built.

Neo-Confucianism had evolved during the Sung period in China
partly as a reaction against Buddhism, which from mid-T’ang times had
increasingly come to be criticized as an alien and harmful creed, and
partly as an attempt to revitalize native Confucian values and institutions.
In the process of its formulation, however, Neo-Confucianism absorbed
much that was fundamentally Buddhist, including an elaborate cosmol-
ogy and metaphysical structure. Of the various schools of Neo-Confu-
cianism that emerged in China, it was the teachings of the great twelfth-
century philosopher Chu Hsi (1 130-1200) that eventually wrcre accepted
as the orthodox doctrine of Confucian learning. From the early four-
teenth century until the abolishment of the examination system in 1905,
Chu Hsi’s brand of Neo-Confucianism was painstakingly studied and
rehashed by countless generations of candidates for the degrees of official
preferment and entry into the ministerial class that were traditionally
bestowed by the Chinese court.

In Japan, too, it was Chu Hsi’s Neo-Confucianism that was embraced
by the Tokugawa shogunate as an orthodoxy. Although shogunate
authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively
little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings,
they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideo-
logically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had
emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.

Chu Hsi Neo-Confucian philosophy is a dualistic system based on
the concepts of ri, “principle,” and ki, a term that seems to defy precise
translation into English but has been rendered as “ether” or “sub-
stance.” The essence of all things lies in their ri or principles, which in
humans can be conceived as their basic natures. But these natures, which
in the orthodox Confucian tradition are regarded as inherently “good,”
become obscured by the functioning of ki% a force governed by the pas-
sions and other emotions that produce evil. The fundamental purpose
of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid hi to allow one’s nature
(ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage,
his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme
ultimate” ( taikyoku ), that governs all things.

Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one ob-
jective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the
acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a
phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta
hsiieh). At the heart of things to investigate was history, wherein lay
knowledge about how the great, sage rulers of the past governed by moral
example. Thus rulers and their ministers were in particular enjoined to

172

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

inquire into the lessons of history in order to chart a proper course of
governance. Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it
may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research
proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general
during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it
also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual
inquiry.

Whereas the objective course to the clarification of one’s ri was fully
within the Confucian tradition, the subjective course appeared to have
been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was
the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,”
which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to
Zen meditation. This does not mean, of course, that Neo-Confucianism
and Zen were in any true sense the same. Whereas Zen and Buddhism
in general urged individuals to renounce this world of suffering and per-
petual flux and to seek entry to a transcendent realm of bliss (in the case
of Zen, through satori or “enlightenment”), Neo-Confucianism held that
the physical world was based on an inherently perfect moral order that
could be known through the illumination of ri writ small and the supreme
ultimate writ large. In short, whereas Buddhism aspired to perfection in
another world, Neo-Confucianism sought it in this world.

Neo-Confucianism’s focus on this world harked back to the most fun-
damental teaching of Confucius himself, which was his humanism. And
from this standpoint Neo-Confucianism, in keeping with all other Con-
fucian schools, was primarily concerned with the conduct and affairs of
people in the here and now. Social order demanded a strict hierarchical
structuring of the classes and conformity by all people with the obliga-
tions imposed by the five primary human relationships: the relationships
between father and son, ruler and subject, husband and wife, older and
younger brothers, and two friends. It can readily be imagined how ap-
pealing the rulers of Tokugawa Japan found these highly conservative
social strictures that called upon people everywhere to accept without
question their lots in life and to place highest value in the performance
of such duties as filial piety to their parents and loyalty to their overlords.
Tokugawa social hierarchy (based on samurai as rulers, and peasants,
artisans, and merchants as ruled) had, in fact, emerged from medieval
feudalism. Neo-Confucianism, imported from China, endorsed this hier-
archy as based on laws thought to be as immutable as the laws of nature
itself.

Much of the credit for establishing and propagating Chu Hsi Neo-
Confucianism has traditionally been given to Hayashi Razan (1583-
1657), a man of diverse scholarly accomplishments who served four
shoguns over a period of more than fifty years. Noted as a Confucian
theorist, historian, and specialist in legal precedence, Razan has been
thought to have done more than anyone else to gain acceptance of the

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

173

Chu Hsi school of Neo-Confucianism as the principal creed of the Toku-
gawa shogunate. Recently, however, scholars have called into question not
only Kazan’s role in attracting the shogunate to Chu Hsi Neo-Confu-
cianism, but even the dating of when that creed was accepted as the
shogunate ’s orthodoxy.9

Neo-Confucianism’s first task in the Tokugawa period had been to dis-
engage itself from Buddhism, a task that was accomplished by Fujiwara
Seika (1561-1619) and Razan, both of whom started their careers as
Buddhist priests and only later were allowed to become independent
Confucian teachers. But apparently not until much later in the seven-
teenth century — long after Kazan’s death — did the shogunate seriously
turn to Neo-Confucianism. In the process, the Hayashi family, in the
generations after Razan, became securely fixed as the official Confucian
advisers to the shogunate and the hereditary heads of a Confucian acad-
emy in Edo.

Although Neo-Confucianism was unquestionably a valuable ideologi-
cal tool for the shogunate and a powerful stimulus to learning in the
Tokugawa period, it also exerted a certain stultifying influence on litera-
ture and the arts in general. Confucianists have always been absorbed
first and foremost with morality, and their liking for didactic literature has
often led to very dull writing. But perhaps the most telling example of
how the Confucian sense of propriety and reserve stifled artistic creativity
in the Tokugawa period can be observed in the history of the distin-
guished Kano school of painters.

From the time of Masanobu in the late fifteenth century, the Kano
artists had served the successive military rulers of Japan — the Ashikaga,
Nobunaga, and Hideyoshi — and shortly after the founding of the Toku-
gawa shogunate they entered into the employ of the country’s new war-
rior chieftains in Edo. Kano Eitoku’s son, Mitsunobu (1565-1608), who
had assisted his father in the decoration of Nobunaga ’s castle at Azuchi
and later did much work for Hideyoshi, was in his later years summoned
by Ieyasu to decorate the Tokugawa castle in Edo. But the true founder
or “restorer” of the Kano as the official school of shogunal painters in
the Tokugawa era was Eitoku’s grandson, Tan’yu (1602-74), who moved
permanently to Edo in 1614. In time, there came to be four major and
twelve minor branches of the Kano engaged on a stipendiary basis by
the shogunate. Moreover, many other bearers of the Kano name were
employed by daimyos as their official han artists. The various Kano
schoolmen thus secured a virtual monopoly of the appointments open to
painters among the new Tokugawa military elite. Anxious to please their
masters — who were strongly imbued with Confucian moralism — and
reluctant to innovate, the Kano artists after Tan’yu produced little work
of real distinction. On the contrary, the best painting of the Tokugawa
period was done by others.

The outstanding artist of the early seventeenth century and one of

174 The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Fig. 49 Poem scroll by Sotatsu and Koetsu (Seattle Art Museum)

the finest painters in all of Japanese history was Tawaraya Sotatsu
(d. 1643), a man of merchant stock who drew his inspiration from the
ancient cultural tradition of the imperial court. Although we know
almost nothing about Sotatsu’s personal life, we can deduce some of the
influences that worked upon him from his close association with another
distinguished craftsman and artist of the age, Hon’ami Koetsu (1 558—
1637).

Koetsu, the son of a Kyoto merchant family that dealt in fine swords,
was a person of many skills, including the tea ceremony, the making and
adornment of pottery and lacquerware, painting, and — perhaps most
notable of all — calligraphy. Indeed, some of the most treasured works of
art to come down from this period are “poem scrolls” done jointly by
K5etsu and Sotatsu, scrolls in which Koetsu inscribed waka (often taken
from such admired anthologies of the ancient period as the tenth-century
Kokinshu and the early thirteenth century Shinkokinshu) over the painting
of flowers, grass, and animals by Sotatsu (fig. 49).

Both Koetsu and Sotatsu were representatives of the upper merchant
class of those cities — especially Kyoto, Nara, and Sakai in the central
provinces — that had flourished commercially during the late medieval
and Momoyama periods. A number of noted artists and men of culture,
from the Higashiyama tea master Shuko to Sen no Rikyu of Hideyoshi’s
day, emerged from the successful merchant houses of these cities to gain
acceptance in the highest social circles of Japan’s courtier and warrior
elites. The Tokugawa period, of course, witnessed a continuation and
expansion of commerce (at least domestically) and the rise of new and
even greater urban centers at Osaka and Edo, cities which in the seven-
teenth century produced a bourgeois culture that catered especially to
the great bulk of their middle- and lower-class townsmen. Hence, the
art of Koetsu and Sotatsu was part of the “higher” or more traditional
line of cultural development from pre-Tokugawa times, and the men

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

175

themselves were members of a former class of privileged merchants
whose influence and status were entering into decline.

Although Sotatsu employed various styles on many different formats,
including horizontal scrolls and folding fans (his family were apparently
fan makers), he is noted chiefly for his work in the monumental decora-
tive tradition of Kano Eitoku and his contemporaries of the Momoyama
epoch. Sotatsu, however, was far more of a “Yamato artist” than his
Momoyama predecessors, insofar as he selected the themes for many of
his greatest paintings from the Japanese, rather than directly from the
Chinese, cultural past. Two of his best-known works are screen paint-
ings based on The Tale of Genji and on the bugaku form of dance that was
popular during the Nara period.

Sotatsu was a superb master of his craft, not only in his use of a
strong and sure brush line and in the matching of colors (including the
characteristic gold-leaf backgrounds of the mature decorative style), but
also in his sense of design and capacity to exploit to a greater degree
than any who came before him the geometries of screen painting. Such
works as the Genji Screen are particularly striking to the modern viewer
as studies in form and the placement of objects that seem extraordi-
narily similar in approach, if not subject matter, to those of Western
artists from at least the time of Cezanne and the Post-Impressionists.

Sotatsu’s immediate followers were mere imitators, but the decorative
school produced one more great master at the end of the seventeenth
century in Ogata Korin (1658-1 7 16), 10 Like Sotatsu and Koetsu (to
whom he was distantly related), Korin was the scion of a merchant
family that had prospered in Kyoto since the Momoyama epoch and had
even had personal and business ties with Hideyoshi and, later, the Toku-
gawa and imperial families. The Ogata were dealers in textiles, many
richly decorated in styles that became popular for clothing during the
late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: no doubt Korin’s exceptionally

176

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

powerful sense of design came in part from familiarity with the family
wares. In fact* Korin himself later became one of the most widely imi-
tated designers of the kosode (small sleeve) type of kimono that was a
main item of clothing in the Tokugawa period.

Korin’s great grandfather had married Koetsu’s sister, and his grand-
father had participated in the activities of an artists’ colony that Koetsu
founded at Takagamine in the outskirts of Kyoto. His father, Ogata
Soken, had also maintained the family interest in the Koetsu-Sotatsu
school of art. But unfortunately, Soken was less able than his predeces-
sors to afford the leisure from business that the pursuit of art required,
and it was during his time that the Ogata family fortunes declined. Never-
theless, Korin was amply provided for during his youth and, by all
accounts, became a true Genroku profligate, frequenting the pleasure
quarters and pursuing a life of idleness and debauchery.

Not until he ran out of funds sometime about 1693 and was forced to
secure a loan from his younger brother Kenzan (1663-1743), who be-
came a distinguished potter and painter in his own right, did Korin think
seriously about the need to find permanent employment. He began by
teaming up with Kenzan— in much the same way that Sotatsu had
teamed up with Koetsu — and decorating a number of the fine ceramic
pieces his brother produced. But although he did this and many other
varied kinds of artwork, Korin, like Sotatsu, achieved his greatest fame
as a painter of folding screens.

Korin was the last of the great decorative artists of early modern
Japan and might be said to have brought the decorative style to its highest
level of perfection. He much admired the painting of Sdtatsu and even
copied a number of the earlier master’s work. But whereas Sotatsu had
based works such as the Genji Screen on familiar and easily recognizable
themes, Korin’s best-known paintings are in a purely design-like and
decorative manner. This is clearly observable in his Iris Screen, one of
the most famous of all Japanese paintings. The screen was actually in-
spired by an episode from The Tales of Ise of the tenth century in which
Narihira, who is having a wayside lunch near where some irises are
growing, is challenged by a companion to compose a waka poem on “A
Traveler’s Sentiments” and to use the syllables in the word “iris” ( kakitsu -
bata) to begin each of its five lines. Korin made no attempt to reproduce
the narrative itself, but simply placed irises in “disembodied” fashion
against a stark gold-leaf background. With their blue blossoms and
green leaves providing a striking contrast to the dominant golden color-
ing of the screen, the flowers seem almost to dance before the viewer’s
eyes (fig. 50).

We noticed that during the fifteenth century a style of residential
room, the shoiti style, evolved from the model of a type of den or library

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

177

Fig. 50 Ogata Korin’s “Iris and Bridge,” a painting of the same subject as the
more famous Iris Screen (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louisa E, McBurney
Gift Fund, 1953)

found in Zen temples. The principal features of the shoin room included
tatami matting (covering the entire floor), fusuma and shoji sliding doors,
an alcove (tokonoma), asymmetrical shelves, and a low, installed desk
called shoin (which gave its name to the entire style of room). Not until
the Momoyama epoch and early Tokugawa period, however, were all
these features fully integrated to form the mature shoin style. In the pro-
cess, three major variations evolved: a grand shoin style for the construc-
tion of rooms to serve as settings for the public functions and rituals of
the samurai elite (shogun and daimyos); an intimate — in many cases,
simple and unpretentious — style for use primarily in private samurai
residences; and a special style called sukiya (literally, “building or room
of taste”) adapted to the needs of the tea ceremony. Tokugawa law pro-
hibited use of the shorn style in the homes of all save samurai, but with
the passage of time members of the other classes managed to incorpo-
rate shoin elements into their rooms. By the time Japan made the transi-
tion into the modern age in the late nineteenth century, the shorn room
was established as the prototypical Japanese residential room. It remains
so today.

In addition to serving a variety of interior design and aesthetic tastes,
the shoin room, through adaptation, also met the demands for social
status distinction that were so important in Tokugawa society, especially
among the samurai. In earlier times, when residences and most other
buildings had floors of polished wood, status was recognized by having
some people sit on mats and others directly on the floor or by using mats
of different sizes or with different border designs. When tatami mats of
uniform size (each about six feet by three feet) were used to cover the
entire floor in the shoin-styic room, however, it became necessary to

178

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

devise new means for showing differences in status, at least between the
guest of honor and the others present at a gathering. In private residences,
the seat in front of the alcove was established as the place of honor (the
records tell us of some cases in which the guest of honor was seated in
the alcove). In rooms in the grand shoin style, the status distinction be-
tween the highest-ranking public official present and the others was fur-
ther reinforced by having him sit in a part of the room’s floor structur-
ally raised a step above the rest of the floor.

Probably the best surviving example of a room in the grand shoin style
is the audience hall at Nijo Castle in Kyoto. One of the most popular
stops on tourist itineraries in Kyoto, the castle was built by the Toku-
gawa as a residence for the shogun when he visited the imperial capital.
Used on two occasions by the third shogun, Iemitsu (shogun, 1623-51),
it remained unoccupied (at least by shoguns) for more than two centu-
ries, until the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate. The audience hall
at Nijo Castle is clearly divided into two parts, an “upper” part for the
shogun and a “lower” part for the daimyos in attendance upon him. Al-
though the difference between the upper and lower parts is only a step,
the rectangular design of the hall and the use of two rows of friezes (one
row about three-fifths up the wall and the other at the edge of the ceil-
ing) to accentuate its horizontality provide a dramatic, imposing setting
for anyone seated on the upper part. The setting is made even more im-
posing by the location of an enormous alcove on the back wall — that is,
the wall in front of which, in Tokugawa times, the shogun sat.

Although the second of the three types of shoin- style architecture
mentioned above was intended by shogunate law, as noted, exclusively
for samurai, by far the finest example of it to come down to us from the
Tokugawa period — and, indeed, one of the truly great masterpieces of
architecture in all of Japanese history — is the Katsura Detached Palace
in southwestern Kyoto, built over a period from about 1616 to 1660 by
a branch of the imperial family (fig. 51). In the rambling structures of
this villa, which has had a profound influence in the twentieth century
on both Japanese and foreign architects, are combined those elements of
Japanese architecture — including cleanness of line, simplicity of adorn-
ment, harmony of buildings to surrounding gardens and ponds, and the
flow of space through rooms with readily removable partitions — that will
forever be a source of aesthetic wonder and delight.

Two authorities say this about the Katsura Detached Palace: “The
Katsura Villa is perhaps the most perfect example in Japan of the inte-
gration of architecture and its natural surroundings. The rustic teahouses
sequestered in garden corners, the stones leading from the pond up to
the Shoin complex, the open verandas and removable exterior screens,
all contribute to that interrelation.”11 The reference here to rustic tea-
houses calls attention to the fact that Katsura, with its several retreats

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

179

Fig. 51 Katsura Detached Palace (photograph by Joseph Shulman)

for the enjoyment of tea or engagement in the tea ceremony, is also an
outstanding example of the third of the shorn styles, the sukiya or tea-
house style.

One final work of Tokugawa-period architecture that must be noted
is the Toshogu Shrine in Nikko (fig. 52). Present-day visitors to Japan
who take the excursion of several hours by train from Tokyo to Nikk5
will be enchanted by its beautiful mountain and forest setting. They will
also be dazzled by a shrine comprising brilliantly colored buildings,
almost completely encased in a profusion of carvings and other ornamen-
tation, that are marvels of craftsmanship. This great shrine was con-
structed during the seventeenth century by the shogunate as the perma-
nent resting place of Ieyasu, whom the Tokugawa transformed into a
national god with the designation of Tosh5 Dai-Gongen (Great Avatar
Who Illuminates the East). During the remainder of the Tokugawa
period, the Toshogu Shrine was visited on countless occasions by
shoguns, emissaries of the imperial court, and even foreign (Korean and
Ryukyuan) envoys.

The calendrical era of Genroku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the
Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approxi-
mately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for
this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace
and steady commercial growth. Such growth was, of course, almost en-

180

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Fig. 52 Toshogu Shrine at Nikko (Consulate General of Japan, New York)

tirely domestic and, owing in large part to the strict limitations on foreign
trade imposed by the seclusion policy, it had begun to taper off markedly
even during the Genroku epoch. Nevertheless, the commercial advances
of the first century of Tokugawa rule were sufficient to bring to the fore
for the first time in Japanese history a numerically significant and pros-
perous class of merchants who, although still regarded as inferior by their
samurai masters, came increasingly to assert their social and cultural in-
dependence.

Other factors that contributed to the flourishing of Genroku culture
were the rapid spread of learning and literacy among all classes in the

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

181

seventeenth century and the transformation of warfare from a practical
reality, which it had been throughout the medieval age, to little more
than a distant memory. The samurai still sported their swords and
flaunted their martial ways, but they were generally resigned to the fact
that their proper, and apparently permanent, function was to practice
the arts of peace rather than those of war.

One result of the great increase in literacy and also of wealth and lei-
sure time for many, especially merchants, by Genroku times was a grow-
ing demand for knowledge about and instruction in “elegant pastimes”
(yugei)y such as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, incense identifi-
cation, the playing of musical instruments, dance, and theatrical chant-
ing. During the medieval age many of these “pastimes” — regarded then as
“ways” (michi) — had been considered very serious pursuits, and knowl-
edge about them was frequently transmitted secretly from one person to
another (for example, from master to disciple). It was believed by the
medieval Japanese that investigation into the way of flowers or the way of
incense, to name but two, could even lead to Buddhist enlightenment.

In the Tokugawa period, most of the secrets of the medieval ways
were revealed to all who wished to know them in the process of the com-
mercialization of the ways and their transformation into elegant pas-
times. Books explaining the various pastimes and giving advice about
how to pursue them were published in great quantities, and schools big
and small were opened to provide personal instruction in them.

The writer Saikaku (discussed below) wrote, “Until age thirteen a
person lacks discernment. From thirteen to twenty-four or twenty-five
he is under the control of his parents. From then until forty-five he must
work for himself and put his family in order. But thereafter he can
devote himself without restraint to the quest of pleasure.”12 One avenue
to pleasure was the elegant pastimes, and many stories have come down
to us about those who threw restraint to the winds in pursuing them.
Here, for example, is the story of a merchant who, because of the good
fortune of birth, did not have to wait until Saikaku’s suggested age of
forty-five to enjoy himself:

From his father’s time he had been brought up in style, and so he never
had the merchant spirit. He lived in the grand manner and went in for fine
tea utensils and tea rooms. . . . He was thoroughly extravagant in his tastes
and put up all sorts of buildings and had tea gardens and tea rooms that
surpassed those of other people in stylishness. . . . People still talk about
him. . . . He took hardly any interest in business and spent his time in amuse-
ments.13

Here is the story of another merchant devoted to pleasure whose
interests, like that of the first merchant, centered especially on the tea
ceremony:

182

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Fig. 53 “House of Entertainment” (detail), ca. mid-1640s (Honolulu Academy
of Arts, Gift of Robert Aller ton, I960 [2758.1])

[He] became extraordinarily dissolute and spent money in abandoning him-
self to promiscuity. . . . Taking up the tea ceremony as his profession, he car-
ried on just as he liked and finally went blind and died at the age of forty-two
or forty-three. As his fortune gradually declined in view of these things, he
pawned his utensils and so on and crashed when advances to daimyo were
not repaid.14

The spawning grounds of townsman culture were the pleasure and
entertainment quarters that formed, almost like extraterritorial enclaves,
within the great cities: the Yoshiwara of Edo, the Shinmachi of Osaka,
and the Shimabara of Kyoto (fig. 53). Abounding in brothels, theatres,
teahouses, public baths, and sundry other places of diversion and assig-
nation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) ofToku-
gawa fact and legend. Ukiyo , although used specifically from about this
time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the
insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.
To medieval Buddhists, this had been a wretched and sorrowful exis-
tence, and ukiyo 15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamen-
tally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to
mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly
changing, exciting, and up-to-date.

In view of the tremendous pressure that Tokugawa society placed on
the individual to conform to the rigid rules of Confucian behavior, sec-

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

183

tions like the pleasure quarters, offering escape from the heavy respon-
sibilities of family and occupation, were almost essential safety valves
against overt social unrest. Although the shogunate always maintained
careful surveillance over them, the quarters were to a great extent self-
governing. Social distinctions based on birth or status meant little with-
in their precincts: it was money, not pedigree, that usually carried the day
in the floating world.

One of the first and greatest chroniclers of townsman life was the
poet and author of prose fiction Ihara Saikaku (1642-93). Born into a
merchant family of Osaka, Saikaku did not begin to write the fiction that
brought him his most lasting fame until he was past forty. His main
literary interest during his earlier years was devoted, rather, to the com-
position of haikai, a form of poetry derived from the linked verse of
medieval times. As a result of the efforts of various innovating schools
(to be discussed later), haikai had been freed from the stylistic and topical
restraints that had rendered linked verse, like the classical waka before
it, virtually devoid of the potentiality for original expression. And, in the
hands of a facile manipulator of words like Saikaku, it served as an effec-
tive device for lively and witty poetizing. Saikaku the poet, however,
seems to have been more interested in quantity than quality. Engaging
in one-man poetry marathons, he composed the staggering total of
23,500 haikai in a single twenty-four-hour period, and thus established
a presumably unbeatable, if not necessarily enviable, record for concen-
trated poetic output.

Frivolous as they appear, the poetry marathons may still be interpreted
as an effort by the exuberant and energetic Saikaku to overcome the
limitations of even the liberated haikai form of poetry, and thus to have
been a kind of prelude to the prose writing that took up the last decade
or so of his life. Saikaku’s firm background in haikai is evident in his
prose works, which are replete with poetic passages of alternating five-
and seven-syllable lines.

Saikaku created a new genre of prose literature called ukiyo-zdshi or
“books of the floating world,” derived from writings known as “ kana
books” (kana-zdshi) that had evolved from the late medieval age. As their
name implies, these latter writings were done largely in the kana syllabary
in order to appeal to as wide a reading audience as possible. Advances in
printing during the early Tokugawa period also helped increase the circu-
lation of kana books, which included purely didactic pieces, adaptations
of classics, travel accounts, and supernatural tales, as well as pleasure
books on subjects such as loose women and the escapades of lecherous
priests and samurai. Yet, by and large, the kana books retained a strongly
medieval character, either in actual content and style or in the use of out-
moded literary devices for presenting moralistic instruction. Saikaku ’s
books of the floating world, by contrast, are realistic and up-to-date and

184

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

are written in a style that, although occasionally didactic, is essentially
detached and analytical.

Most of Saikaku’s prose fiction falls into three major categories: erotic
(koshoku), townsman, and samurai books. Since Saikaku was never en-
tirely at home when writing about the samurai class, he did his best work
within the erotic and townsman categories. His first book, published in
1682, was entitled The Life of a Man Who Lived for Love (Koshoku Ichidai
Otoko)lb and was an “erotic” work, although the term “ koshoku ” in its
title might more accurately be taken to mean rakish rather than simply
erotic. As variously used by Saikaku, koshoku came to have a wide range
of meanings, from rakish or romantic on the one hand to lecherous or
perverted on the other. In any case, a new form of love — koshoku — wTas
firmly established by Saikaku and others of the Genroku epoch as a
major theme in writing and the visual arts. Until this time, love, as con-
ventionalized in the arts, had been based primarily on the principles of
courtly love, which had been evolved some seven or eight hundred years
earlier by the Heian courtiers and which stressed the aesthetic rather
than the erotic.

The Life of a Man Whc > Lived for Love is the story of Yonosuke, a towns-
man who commences a long life of sexual adventures by making ad-
vances to a maid at the age of eight; at sixty-one, after having enjoyed all
the delights that Japanese women can provide him, he sets forth by boat
to find an island inhabited only by females. Divided into fifty-four chap-
ters, each of which deals with a year in Yonosuke ’s life, The Life of a Man
Who Lived for Love is little more than a collection of spicy episodes
brought together as the doings of an indefatigable rake.

In 1686 Saikaku wrote another erotic work, entitled Five Women Who
Chose Love (Koshoku Gonin China), which contains five fairly lengthy and
well-structured tales that may properly be called novelettes. Whereas The
Life of a Man Who Lived for Love deals mostly with life in the pleasure
quarters, Five Women Who Chose Love concerns women of respectable
townsman and peasant origins who, because of their excessively passion-
ate natures, become involved in affairs that lead in all cases but one to dis-
honor and death. In this work, then, Saikaku shifted from accounts of the
artificial world of the pleasure quarters to stories, based on real events,
of people in everyday life. He also treated one of the most important
social themes in all of Tokugawa literature, the conflict between human
feelings (ninjd) and the heavy sense of duty (giri) imposed on the indi-
vidual by the feudal laws and mores of the age.

In the same year that he wrote Five Women Who Chose Love, Saikaku
produced still another major erotic work, entitled The Life of an Amorous
Woman (Koshoku Ichidai Onna). This is a tale of the darker side of love,
told in the first person, of uncontrolled lust and depravity. The heroine
is a nymphomaniac (descended on her father’s side from the courtier class

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

185

of Kyoto) who makes her way through life largely on her own ingenuity
and resourcefulness, engaging in a variety of occupations, including those
of dancer, parlor maid, seamstress, and calligraphy teacher, as well as
courtesan and, finally, common streetwalker. After noting that as a girl
she had become intoxicated with love (of the sort she observed being
practiced at court) and had come to regard it as the most important thing
in life, she recounts her first affair at the tender age of twelve:

There is naught in this world so strange as love. The several men who had set
their affections on me were both fashionable and handsome; yet none of them
aroused any tender feelings in me. Now, there was a humble warrior in the
service of a certain courtier. The fellow was low in rank and of a type that most
women would regard askance. Yet from the first letter that he wrote me
his sentences were charged with a passion powerful enough to slay one. In
note after note he set forth his ardent feelings, until, without realizing it, I
myself began to be troubled in my heart. It was hard for us to meet, but with
some cunning I managed to arrange a tryst and thus it was that I gave my
body to him.

Our amour was bound to become the gossip of the court and one dawn it
“emerged into the light.” In punishment I was banished to the neighborhood
of Uji Bridge. My love, most grievous to relate, was put to death. For some
days thereafter, as I lay tossing on my bed, half asleep, half awake, his silent
form would appear terrifyingly before me. In my agony I thought that I must
needs take my own life; yet, after some days had passed, I completely forgot
about him. From this one may truly judge that nothing in this world is as
base and fickle as a woman’s heart.17

The years take their toll, and in the end the “Amorous Woman,” old and
destitute, ventures forth yet again in the dark of night with the forlorn
hope of attracting unwary customers:

In these days people have become so canny that, though it be only a matter of
ten coppers, they exercise more care in their choice of a harlot from the streets
than does a rich man in selecting a high-class courtesan. Sometimes they will
wait until a passer-by appears with a torch, sometimes they will conduct the
woman to the lantern of a guard box — in either case they scrutinize her closely,
and nowadays, even when it is only a matter of hasty diversion, a woman who
is old or ugly is promptly turned down. “For a thousand men who see, there
are a thousand blind.” So the saying goes; but on that night, alas, I did not
meet a single one who was blind!

Finally dawn began to appear: first the eight bells rang out, then seven.
Aroused by their sound, the pack-horse drivers set forth with a clatter in the
early-morning light. Yet I persisted in walking the streets, until the hour when
the blacksmith and the bean-curd dealer opened their shutters. But no doubt
my appearance and demeanour were not suited to this calling, for during the
entire time not a single man solicited my favours. I resolved, then, that this
would be my last effort in the Floating World at plying the lustful trade, and I
gave it up for once and all.18

186

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Saikaku ’s two great themes were love and money, and in his towns-
man books, written mostly after his erotic studies, he examined the chonin
ethic of working hard, being clever, and becoming a financial success.
The Eternal Storehouse of Japan (Nihon Eitaigura )> a collection of stories
on the making and losing of fortunes, is perhaps his most celebrated
work in this category. Yet, in the same way that he shifted in his erotic
works from the romanticization of love to a Defoe-like recounting of the
corrupting effect of sexual passion in The Life of an Amorous Woman ,
Saikaku turned his attention in his later townsman writings to the life of
the middle- and lower-class merchant, which was generally one of un-
ceasing drudgery and the struggle to keep one step ahead of the bill
collector.

We observed earlier in this chapter the great emphasis placed on
humanism in the Neo-Confucian tradition. But it is important also to
note that the kind of humanism that evolved in the Tokugawa period
was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the
Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed
with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings,
and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived
of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the
people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as
samurai, farmers, and courtesans. We can see this kind of humanistic
attitude reflected clearly in the writings of Saikaku and other authors of
Tokugawa times, whose fictional characters are invariably drawn either
two-dimensionally or simply as stereotypes. For the most part, characters
in Tokugawa literature do what we suppose they will do; there is little in
the literature as a whole of that quality — character development — that is
probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.

While Saikaku was perfecting a new kind of prose fiction, two forms
of popular drama that had been evolving from at least the early seven-
teenth century — the kabuki and the puppet theatre — also blossomed
into maturity.

Kabuki owed much to both no and kydgen , the main theatrical forms
of the medieval age. This is obvious not only in the kind of plays, acting
techniques, and musical and narrative accompaniments used in early
kabukiy but also in the physical staging of these productions. Even more
immediate influences, however, can be traced that help explain how
kabuki became the vigorous and popular type of entertainment it was
during its first great flourishing in Genroku times.

The acknowledged originator of kabuki was a woman named Okuni,
whose background is obscure but who was quite likely a former atten-
dant at the great Shinto shrine at Izumo. Sometime in the late 1590s or
the early years of the seventeenth century, Okuni led a troupe of female
dancers in Kyoto in a kind of outdoor musical entertainment that was

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

187

labeled (by others) “ kabuki dancing” and, as a result of its commercial
success, soon gave rise to competing troupes. The term kabuki was de-
rived from katamuki — “slanted” or “strongly inclined” — and was used in
this age to describe novel or eccentric behavior. Its application to the
dancing of Okuni and her girls is a clear indication that the first kabuki
company was regarded as a daring and not very proper undertaking.

One thing the Okuni troupe performed was “?iembutsu dancing” (nem-
butsu odori), a type of religious ecstaticism (in which people danced
around and chanted their praise to Amida buddha) that dated back to
the tenth-century evangelist of Pure Land Buddhism, Kuya, but was
especially popularized among people everywhere by Ippen during the
Kamakura period. By the late medieval age, nembutsu odori had become
a form of folk dance that was performed more for entertainment than
for religious purposes, and it survives in Japan today in the dancing
done annually in the midsummer bon festival for the dead.

In addition to dances of this sort, the Okuni troupe also performed
farcical skits in which they portrayed encounters between men and pros-
titutes or reenacted assignation scenes in teahouses and bathhouses. (No
doubt the girls did these skits very professionally, since they were all
apparently practicing harlots on the side.) Shogunate officials sternly dis-
approved of both the onstage and offstage behavior of female performers
such as these, and in 1629, after a period of indecision, they banned
their participation in kabuki altogether. This had the immediate effect of
giving impetus to the rise of another form of entertainment known as
“young men’s kabuki” that had gradually been developing in the shadow
of “women’s kabuki .” The performances of these attractive young men
included certain kinds of acrobatics and flashing swordplay that were
eventually to be incorporated into the mainstream of kabuki acting; but,
to the dismay of the authorities, the youths were as much of a social
nuisance as the female kabuki performers since they aroused the homo-
sexual passions that had been widespread in Japan (particularly among
samurai and Buddhist priests) from the medieval age on. Finally, in 1652,
after a number of unseemly incidents including public brawls in the
midst of performances over the affections of the actors on stage, the sho-
gunate also banned young men’s kabuki. Henceforth, only adult males (or
youths who had shaved their forelocks to give the appearance that they
were adults) were allowed to perform on the kabuki stage.

Throughout the Tokugawa period, kabuki was subjected to a greater
or lesser degree of official suppression, and this suppression had an ex-
tremely important influence on the way in which it developed. Shogun-
ate officials hesitated to ban kabuki entirely for at least two reasons.
First, they regarded kabuki , like the floating world of which it became an
integral part, as a necessary outlet for the more elemental drives of the
masses, even though these grossly offended their Confucian sensibilities.

188

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

And second, they no doubt realized that, like prostitution itself (both
male and female), it could never be completely eradicated and might
just as well be held to some kind of formal account.

The banning of women from kabuki gave rise to the unique person-
age of the onnagata, or male performer of female roles. So special are the
acting qualities cultivated over the centuries by the onnagata that, even if
women were permitted to perform in kabuki today, they would have
little or no advantage over men in learning the onnagata art.

One of the reasons why young men’s kabuki was not prohibited until
as late as 1652 was that the third Tokugawa shogun, Iemitsu (1604-51),
had a great fondness for the youthful actors. In finally taking the step
after his death, shogunate authorities made clear that, although they
could hardly hope to convert the kabuki actors and their patrons into
puritans, they intended to restrict the extreme promiscuity that had been
so blatantly apparent on the kabuki stage. At the same time that they
banished young men from the stage, the authorities also called upon the
people in kabuki to devote their attention to becoming real actors instead
of just vaudeville-like performers whose main business was illicit sex.

The injunction apparently had some effect, for kabuki thereafter was
gradually transformed into a truly dramatic art. Actors assumed special-
ized roles (such as those of onnagata) , draw curtains were introduced
and plays divided into acts, more scenery and stage props were used, and
the physical theatre was altered and adapted to the special needs of
kabuki . Yet, although the particular prohibitions imposed by the shogun-
ate may have helped it to become a more legitimate form of theatre,
official treatment of kabuki throughout the Tokugawa period as a kind of
necessary evil probably also prevented it from rising to a higher level of
refinement. Kabuki has been and remains a conspicuously plebeian
theatre.

In kabukiy as it developed from the late seventeenth century, the actor
is supreme. The texts of the plays are hardly more than scenarios or
guides for the actor, who is expected to embellish or alter them as he
sees fit. The typical kabuki play consists of a series of dramatic high
points or tableaux that are made exciting by the broad gesturing, postur-
ing, and declamations of the actors (fig. 54).

Although kabuki prospered in both the Edo and Osaka-Kyoto regions,
it was particularly among the citizens of Edo, whose number included a
far greater percentage of samurai and whose tastes tended to be more
robust and unrestrained, that it enjoyed its greatest patronage. In the
early and mid-seventeenth century, kabuki had competed for popularity
in Edo with the puppet theatre ( bunraku ), but after a great fire in 1657
had destroyed much of the city and brought about the reconstruction of
the Yoshiwara pleasure quarters in the present-day Asakusa section of
Tokyo, most of the puppet chanters (who were the principal function-

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

189

Fig. 54 Scene from a kabuki play (Japan National Tourist Organization)

aries in bunraku) moved to the Kansai (Kyoto-Osaka region) and left
kabuki unchallenged in the theatre world of Edo.

The two most famous names in kabuki during the Genroku epoch
were Ichikawa Danjuro (1660-1704) of Edo and Sakata Tojuro ( 1 647—
1709) of the Kansai. Danjuro, who was influenced by an early form of
puppet theatre that dealt with the martial exploits of a semi-legendary
hero named Kimpira, developed a style of acting called “rough business”
(aragoto). So great were Danjuro ’s success and fame that this rough busi-
ness was widely imitated among Edo performers and became probably
the most characteristic feature of that city’s brand of kabuki. Sakata
Tojuro, on the other hand, practiced “soft business” (zvagoto) in his act-
ing and thus demonstrated the Kansai preference for the more intimate
and feminine (rather than heroic and masculine, as in Edo), a preference
that can be seen even more obviously in the Kansai approach to bunraku . 19

The earliest recorded practitioners of puppetry in Japanese history
were groups of people in the late Heian period known as kugutsu , who
moved about from place to place in gypsy-like fashion and staged enter-
tainments in which the men manipulated wooden marionettes and per-
formed feats of magic and the women sang. In addition, the women
apparently also liberally purveyed their physical charms, further proof
that from early times prostitution and the theatre (to use the term loosely)
were closely linked in Japan. Little is known about puppetry during the
next few centuries, although there appears to have been a revival of

190

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

interest in it during the fourteenth century as a result of the importation
of string-operated puppets from China.

The mature art of bunraku, as it was developed in the late sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, has been defined by Donald Keene as “a
form of storytelling, recited to a musical accompaniment and embodied
by puppets on a stage.”20 Of the three main elements of bunraku — story-
telling, musical accompaniment, and the use of puppets — it is the story-
telling (and, to a lesser extent, its musical accompaniment) that is of
greatest importance in the history of Japanese culture. Puppetry was a
minor theatrical form that was used to supplement the traditionally
derived art of the bunraku chanters.

Storytelling as performed by itinerant chanters, who were often Bud-
dhist priests, had been popular throughout the medieval age. Among the
important literary sources from which the chanters drew their material
were the great war chronicles, including The Tale of the Heike and Tai-
heiki. For accompaniment, the chanters generally used a lute-like four-
stringed instrument called the biwa. But by the late sixteenth century,
another instrument, the three-stringed samisen , which had its origins in
China and was introduced to Japan via the Ryukyu Islands, was coming
into vogue among chanters. Roughly akin to the banjo, the samisen gives
off a rather brittle, twanging sound (in contrast to the languid tone of
the biwa) and is particularly well suited for the accompaniment of the
vocal techniques of chanters. During the Tokugawa period, the samisen
became the principal musical instrument in both the kabuki and bunraku
theatres.

It was thus the adaptation of the samisen to the ancient art of chanting
and the employment of puppets to depict the narrative action declaimed
by chanters that gave rise to bunraku . The two men most responsible for
effecting the final evolution of bunraku to a serious dramatic form in Gen-
roku times were the chanter Takemoto Gidayu (1651-1714) and the
playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724). In 1684 Gidayu,
whose distinctive chanting style became the most widely admired of its
day, opened a puppet theatre called the Takemoto-za in Osaka and en-
gaged the services of Chikamatsu, a writer of samurai origins from Kyoto
who had already achieved some note as the author of plays for the
renowned kabuki actor Sakata Tojuro.

Although Chikamatsu wrote for both the kabuki and bunraku theatres,
his work for the latter won for him the great stature he enjoys in the his-
tory of Japanese literature. His bunraku plays are of two general types,
historical plays (jidaimono) and domestic or contemporary plays (sewa-
niono). The historical plays are derived from the same kinds of narrative
materials that Japanese chanters had used for centuries and are by their
very nature rousing tales of derring-do and romantic love. To increase
further the excitement of their presentation on stage, Chikamatsu and

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

191

other bunraku playwrights also provided in their scripts for the perfor-
mance of fabulous tumbling acts and supernatural feats, which their
audiences loved and which the puppets, unlike the live actors of kabuki,
could convincingly do. Chikamatsu’s best-known historical play is The
Battles of Coxinga (Kokusenya Kassen), based on the story of a Chinese
loyalist who held out against the Manchus after they invaded China and
overthrew the Ming dynasty in 1644.

Chikamatsu did not write his first domestic play, The Love Suicides at
Sonezaki (Sonezaki Shinju), until 1703. With this work, derived from
actual events that had recently occurred in Osaka, Chikamatsu not only
created a new category of puppet plays but also found the precise
medium in which he was to do his finest writing. The Love Suicides at
Sonezaki, which was enormously popular with Genroku audiences, is
constructed around a simple plot that Chikamatsu used, with variations
and embellishments, as the basis for a number of his subsequent domestic
plays. It tells the story of a soy sauce salesman named Tokubei who is in
love with Ohatsu, a courtesan of the Osaka pleasure quarters. As the
play opens, we learn that Tokubei has quarreled with his employer and
must return a sum of money that the employer (actually Tokubei’s uncle)
had advanced as a dowry for his daughter, whom Tokubei now refuses
to marry. The kindhearted although dull-witted Tokubei has tempo-
rarily loaned the money to a friend, and, when he seeks to reclaim it, the
erstwhile friend not only denies that he ever received any money but
even charges that Tokubei has forged his seal. In the ensuing argument,
Tokubei is soundly thrashed. Distraught and utterly at a loss what to do,
he proceeds to Ohatsu’s place where the two lovers, without even con-
sidering an alternative course of action, decide to commit double sui-
cide. That night they set forth on a michiyuki or “lovers’ journey” to
their deaths at Sonezaki Shrine.

As a writer of domestic plays for the puppet theatre, Chikamatsu was,
like Saikaku, a major chronicler of townsman life during the Genroku
epoch. Unlike Saikaku, who in his townsman works examined virtually
all aspects of the behavioral patterns and standards of value of the emer-
gent bourgeoisie of Tokugawa Japan, Chikamatsu concerned himself
chiefly with the lives of lower-class townsmen and specifically with the
conflict between duty or obligation (giri) and the dictates of human feel-
ings (ninjo) to which the members of all classes were subject in this
feudal age.

Even though Chikamatsu is famous for his treatment of this giri-nmjo
conflict, it is not in fact so strongly presented in his plays as it is in other
literary works of the Tokugawa period, such as vendetta stories in which
samurai unhesitatingly forsake their own personal interests and even
sacrifice their lives to meet the exacting demands of their warrior’s code
of honor. Tokubei and Ohatsu of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, although

192

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

in difficult straits, do not seem to be under any unique or overwhelming
pressure to act as they do. Rather, they appear to be neurotically obsessed
with the “purity” of their love for each other and with the religious urge
to perpetuate it through death for Buddhist eternities to come. In later
“love suicide” plays, Chikamatsu made the pressure of gin more ex-
plicit; even so, his favorite theme might better be described as one of “all
for love” rather than of fundamental conflict between duty and human
feelings.

The literary high point of the love suicide play is the michiyuki> the
journey of the lovers to their predetermined fate. Chikamatsu’s michi-
yuki passages are composed in richly textured and often hauntingly beau-
tiful poetry. Perhaps the most memorable is the one from The Love Sui-
cides at Sonezakiy which begins:

Narrator:

Tokubei:

Ohatsu:

Narrator:

Tokubei:

Ohatsu :
Narrator:

Farewell to this world, and to the night farewell.

We who walk the road to death, to what should we be
likened?

To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard,
Vanishing with each step we take ahead:

How sad is this dream of a dream!

Ah, did you count the bell? Of the seven strokes
That mark the dawn, six have sounded.

The remaining one will be the last echo
We shall hear in this life.

It will echo the bliss of nirvana.

Farewell, and not to the bell alone —

They look a last time on the grass, the trees, the sky.
The clouds, the river go by unmindful of them;

The Dipper’s bright reflection shines in the wrater.

Let’s pretend that Umeda Bridge
Is the bridge the magpies built
Across the Milky Way, and make a vow
To be husband and wife stars for eternity.

I promise. I’ll be your wife forever.

They cling together — the river waters
Will surely swell with the tears they shed.

Across the river, in a teahouse upstairs,

Some revelers, still not gone to bed,

Are loudly talking under blazing lamps —

No doubt gossiping about the good or bad
Of this year’s crop of lovers’ suicides;

Their hearts sink to hear these voices.

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

193

Tokubei: How strange! but yesterday, even today,

We spoke as if such things did not concern us.
Tomorrow we shall figure in their gossip.

If the world will sing about us, let it sing.21

Bunraku enjoyed its greatest prosperity in the half-century after Chika-
matsu’s death, from about 1725 until the 1780s. An important technical
innovation during this period was the introduction in 1734 of the puppet
manipulated by three men, one responsible for the back, right hand,
head, and eyebrows; another for the left hand; and a third for the feet
(fig, 55). So vigorous was the puppet theatre that its influence was
strongly felt even in kabuki circles, where actors imitated the stiff body
movements of the puppets and producers adopted bunraku methods of
staging and presentation. One sad development, however, was the decline
in popularity of Chikamatsu’s plays, regarded as too wordy and slow-
moving for the new, more lively puppets.

If Saikaku was a realist and Chikamatsu a romantic, the third great
literary figure of the Genroku epoch, the poet Matsuo Basho (1644-94),
was something of a mystic. Born into a low-ranking samurai family,
Basho became a ronin or “masterless samurai” at the age of twenty-two
upon the death of his lord. Rather than seek similar employment else-
where, the young Basho, who had long been interested in poetry, aban-
doned his samurai status and, after studying for a while in Kyoto, moved
to the military capital of Edo. Edo remained his nominal home for the
rest of his life, although Basho, like several famous poets of the past
(including Saigyo of the early Kamakura period and Sogi of the Higashi-
yama epoch), sought inspiration for his verses in frequent travels into
the provinces. He died of illness in Osaka at the age of fifty while on a
final journey whose ultimate destination was Nagasaki.

Linked verse, the major form of poetry in the late medieval age,
had, as we have seen, suffered the same fate as the classic zvaka from
which it was derived by becoming oppressively burdened with rigid sty-
listic and topical conventions. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, efforts, motivated by the rise of a townsman culture, were made
to liberate linked verse from the shackles of the past. One of the most
important figures in this movement was Matsunaga Teitoku (1571-
1653), whose Teimon school of poets asserted their right to go beyond
the restricted vocabulary of the traditional linked verse and to use more
prosaic and even vulgar language in versification. Yet, even though the
members of the Teimon school were significant innovators in the lan-
guage of their poetry (commonly called by this time haikai or “light
verse”), they remained staunch traditionalists in their fidelity to the
topical dictates of earlier poets and to what they regarded as the invio-
lable spirit of the aristocratic linked verse of medieval times. Not until

Fig. 55 Scenes from the puppet theatre (Consulate General of Japan, New York)

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

195

the meteoric rise in the late 1670s and early 1680s of another group of
poets called the Danrin school was haikai finally freed, in terms of both
language and subject matter, from the heavy hand of the linked-verse
masters of the past. It was as a member of the Danrin school that
Saikaku poured forth his great and indeed overflowing stream of haikai
verse.

But the newly risen Danrin movement, despite its importance in mak-
ing possible the subsequent flowering of haiku , was itself seriously re-
stricted by the fact that its followers concentrated mainly on clever word-
plays, allusions, and references to current fads and fashions. The Danrin
poets soon exhausted the possibilities of such an ephemeral approach to
poetry and found themselves left with a corpus of verse that held little
prospect of appealing to posterity.

It was Basho who led Japanese poetry out of the Danrin impasse.
Although he never fully abandoned the writing of haikai , Basho adopted
as his principal medium of expression the seventeen-syllable haiku . Cer-
tainly one of the world’s briefest verse forms, haiku derives from the first
phrase or link of the classic zvaka and consists of three lines of 5, 7, and
5 syllables. Since the rules are simple, almost anyone can compose these
seventeen-syllable poems, and indeed Japanese of all classes have written
haiku through the centuries from Bashd’s time. But the haiku is some-
thing like the ultimate in deceptive simplicity, and out of a vast number
of acceptable ones only a fraction are apt to be truly fine. Basho ’s output
of haiku was not numerically great (perhaps a thousand or so have come
down to us), but it is of such an extraordinary quality as to make him
without question one of the greatest of Japanese poets.

With little more than a handful of syllables at his disposal, the writer
of haiku obviously cannot hope to enter into extended poetic dialogue.
He must seek to create an effect, capture a mood, or bring about a sud-
den and sharp insight into the truth of human existence. Basho found
much of his inspiration in Zen Buddhism, and many of his best haiku
are the product of his intuitive and profoundly mystical response to life
and nature. Basho’s insights are not explicitly presented. His best-known
haiku , for example, is

An ancient pond

A frog jumps in

The sound of water.

Basho has not said how wondrous it is to observe the meeting of that
which is eternal, as embodied in the ancient pond, and that which is fleet-
ing, as represented by the frog’s jump. In the best Zen and haiku spirit,
he has simply juxtaposed the two images without subjective comment
and has left it to the reader to draw7 whatever meaning or meanings he
can from the poem.

196

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Of all Basho’s many journeys, the most famous was one he took with
a companion into the remote northern provinces in 1689 and later im-
mortalized in the travel account The Narrow Road of Oku (Oku no Hoso -
michi). Basho's travel accounts, of which this is by far the finest example,
were not intended to be accurate, diary-like records of his journeys.
They are highly poetic evocations of his feelings and sentiments as he
visited places famous for their natural beauty, for their association with
former poet-travelers, or for their roles in the great events of Japanese
history. As Basho journeyed through the provinces, his fame preceded
him and he was often met by people who asked him to write haiku or to
join them in a round of linked-verse composition. But Basho did not
need others to inspire him, and the most beautiful passages in The Narrow
Road of Oku are those in which he was moved to compose haiku upon
encountering some memorable scene or viewing a surpassingly lovely
setting:

We first climbed up to Castle-on-the-Heights, from where we could see the
Kitagami, a large river that flows down from the north. Here Yoshitsune once
fortified himself with some picked retainers, but his great glory turned in a
moment into this wilderness of grass. “Countries may fall, but their rivers
and mountains remain. When spring comes to the ruined castle, the grass is
green again/' These lines went through my head as I sat on the ground, my
bamboo hat spread under me. There I sat weeping, unaware of the passage of
time.

Natsugusa ya The summer grasses —

Tsmvamono domo ga Of brave soldiers’ dreams

Yume no ato The aftermath.

In the domain of Yamagata is a mountain temple called the Ryushaku, a
place noted for its tranquility. People had urged us “just to take a look,” and
we had turned back at Obanasawa to make the journey, a distance of about
fifteen miles. It was still daylight when we arrived. After asking a priest at the
foot of the mountain for permission to spend the night, we climbed to the
temple at the summit. Boulders piled on rocks had made this mountain, and
old pines and cedars grew on its slopes. The earth and stones were worn and
slippery with moss. At the summit the doors of the hall were all shut, and not
a sound could be heard. Circling around the cliffs and crawling among the
rocks we reached the main temple. In the splendor of the scene and the
silence I felt a wonderful peace penetrate my heart.

Shizakasa ya Such stillness —

Iwa ni shimiiru The cries of the cicadas

Semi no koe Sink into the rocks.22

Perhaps Basho’s true greatness lay in the fact that, at a time when
other Japanese poets (i.e., of the Danrin school) were recklessly rejecting
the poetic traditions of the past in the pursuit of artistic freedom and

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

197

modernity, he sought to bring together the old and the new. His inquiry
into Zen brought him into communion with the very essence of the aes-
thetic spirit of medieval culture. At the same time, as a former member
of the Danrin movement, he was fully liberated from the restraining
conventions of medieval poetry and was very much a part of the great
haikai-haiku movement of the seventeenth century, which accompanied
and was made possible by the economic and cultural, if not political,
burgeoning of the townsman class. He was thus as much a Genroku man
as either Saikaku or Chikamatsu. But to a far greater degree than either
of his distinguished contemporaries, Basho dealt with the eternal veri-
ties and spoke to all people of all ages.

Still another major art form to emerge from the Genroku epoch —
and indeed the form of Japanese art probably best known in the West—
was the woodblock print, used to depict ukiyo-e or “pictures of the float-
ing world.” Any attempt to trace the precise origins of the ukiyo-e would
necessitate a detailed investigation of the many streams of development
in painting in Japan from at least the late medieval era on, and so com-
plex are these streams that the task could probably not be definitively
done. But the immediate precursor of the ukiyo-e was clearly the genre
painting, discussed in the last chapter, that flourished in the late six-
teenth and early seventeenth centuries. In fact, it is debatable what cri-
teria should be used to distinguish the earlier genre works from the
ukiyo-e , although one crucial distinction is certainly the fact that the
former were painted (so far as we know) by members of the “aristo-
cratic” schools such as the Kano, whereas the ukiyo-e were done by
townsman artists.

The establishment of ukiyo-e as an independent art form was, to an
exceptional degree, the work of one man, Hishikawa Moronobu (161 8—
94). Little is known of Moronobu’s background, although he may have
been the son of a Kyoto embroiderer. It is certain, in any case, that he
grew up in the region of the ancient imperial capital, where he studied
the various schools of art still flourishing there. Moronobu probably
moved to Edo in the 1660s, at a time when the city was being exten-
sively rebuilt after the great fire of 1657. This was a critical period in the
history of Edo, for in the rebuilding of it much of the influence of the
older, more traditional Kansai culture was cast off and the city was
allowed to assume an appearance and style uniquely its own. It was from
about this time, for example, that kabuki became the theatre par excel-
lence of Edo; and in Moronobu the newly reconstructed city found an
artist who perfectly captured in visual form its vital and engaging spirit.
Throughout the Tokugawa period, the art of ukiyo-e remained, first and
foremost, the art of Edo.

Moronobu possessed two qualities that, apart from his natural artistic
ability, made him a successful pioneer in ukiyo-e . He had an intimate

198

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

and personal interest in townsman life, unlike the detached curiosity of
most earlier genre painters; and he was sufficiently self-confident and
assertive to demand recognition as an independent artist. Much genre
painting had been done by unknown people, and in Moronobu’s younger
years about the only opportunity for aspiring painters, unless they were
members of the officially patronized schools like the Kano and Tosa,
was the relatively humble chore of drawing anonymous illustrations for
popular books. Moronobu not only insisted upon signing his paintings,
he emphatically identified himself on them with such signatures as “The
Yamato artist Hishikawa Moronobu.” Moreover, he was the first artist
of his kind to go beyond the secondary function of illustrating books and
to produce both picture albums and “single-sheet” artworks.

But Moronobu’s great innovation was to make the shift from painting
to woodblock printing. Although he and other ukiyo-e artists continued
to do some of their work in paint, it was their use of the woodblock print
that gave the ukiyo-e its special character. Not only did woodblock print-
ing make possible the production of pictures in numbers sufficient to
meet the great demand for this plebeian art form; it also provided a
medium — that is, pictures printed in ink by means of carved woodblocks
— that made ukiyo-e unique and instantly distinguishable from all other
kinds of Japanese art.

The earliest ukiyo-e , done by Moronobu and others, were simply black
and white prints known as “primitives” (fig. 56). Gradually, however,

Fig. 56 “Street Scene in the Yoshiwara” by Moronobu (The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund , 1949)

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

199

artists began to have colors (usually red or reddish brown and green)
painted in by hand on their prints, although these early efforts at the use
of color generally added very little to the artistic merit of the ukiyo-e.
Nevertheless, the urge to employ color persisted, and shortly after the
mid-eighteenth century the technique of printing in multicolors and even
halftones was perfected. The multicolored print, known as nishiki-e or
“brocade picture,” necessitated close cooperation among three people,
the artist, the woodblock carver, and the printer, and thus became in a
very real sense a joint artistic endeavor.

From the beginning, ukiyo-e artists were primarily interested in two
subjects — women of the pleasure quarters and kabuki actors — and
throughout the Tokugawa period the overwhelming majority of prints
they produced were of these two representative types of Edo nightlife,
sometimes done with detailed backgrounds but more commonly with
few if any background elements. Not surprisingly, the ukiyo-e represen-
tations of pleasure women and actors usually stress the sensual and erotic,
in contrast to the earlier genre paintings in which people were for the
most part portrayed objectively and with little infusion of emotion on the
part of the artist.

To some lovers of ukiyo-e , the early primitive works in plain black
and white or black and white with slight coloring are the most vigorous
and exciting of all Japanese woodblock prints. But the greatest names in
ukiyo-e are of artists who flourished after development of the multi-
colored “brocade” print, first used in 1765 by Suzuki Harunobu (1725-
70). Harunobu achieved widespread popularity not only for his superb
use of color but also for his portrayals of beautiful young women in
dreamlike settings (fig. 57). Harunobu’s women, unlike those of other
ukiyo-e artists, are more charming than erotic in appearance. In addi-
tion, their faces and expressions are almost all identical, reflecting
the same kind of humanism based on the concept of people not as indi-
viduals but as two-dimensional types or even stereotypes that is found
in the characters of Saikaku, Chikamatsu, and other Tokugawa period
writers.

Although a number of artists of the ukiyo-e school are noted for their
depiction of feminine beauty, the most celebrated is Kitagawa Utamaro
(1753-1806). Utamaro’s typical beauties are long and willowy and have
about them a languid and sensual air (fig. 58). Often they are portrayed
in great intimacy, with one or both breasts bare and with hair and cloth-
ing in casual disarray. To many later — and often unabashedly puritanical
— critics Utamaro has epitomized the decadence into which they believe
ukiyo-e sank at the end of the eighteenth century. It is true that Utamaro
lapsed into a kind of mannerism in his final years and that, with the
exception of the work of two early nineteenth century artists — Hokusai
and Hiroshige, who were in any case unusual in that they specialized

200

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

Fig. 57 “Waterfall” by Harunobu ( courtesy of the Brooklyn
Museum , Gift of Louis V Ledoux)

chiefly in landscapes — the traditional ukiyo-e did in fact lose most of its
vitality' about this time. Nevertheless, Utamaro’s art, as observable in his
better prints, is clearly of superior quality. In sureness of line, overall
composition, and delicacy of handling subject matter, he ranks with the
best of the ukiyo-e masters.

We may also note that Utamaro, in his celebration of the beauty of
the female body, represented something new in the Japanese cultural
tradition. Until this age of townsman culture and establishment of the
artistic theme of erotic love, the Japanese — in marked contrast, for
example, to the Greeks — had devoted little attention to the human
body, either male or female, as an object of beauty. Lady Murasaki, the
author of The Tale of Genji, observed in her diary: “Unforgettably horri-
ble is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm.”23 And
in the Genji , which so wonderfully evokes the high age of court life in the
Heian period, we find very little concrete description of what people

Fig. 58 Half-length portrait from the “Studies in Physiognomy: Ten Kinds
of Women” by Utamaro (Cleveland Museum of An, Bequest of Edward Loder
Whittemore)

202

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

looked like. When there are descriptions, they are largely restricted to
facial features and, in the case of women, to their hair, which, if long
and lustrous, constituted the most important feature of feminine beauty
in that age. The court women in the Genji Scrolls are invariably shown
in voluminous robes, with only their rather plump, whitened faces and
their hands protruding and with hair — body-length or longer — flowing
down their backs (see fig. 27). Courtier tastes, and indeed the tradition
of courtly love, persisted throughout the medieval centuries; and even
though samurai replaced courtiers as rulers, we find no new interest in
the arts in the physical beauty of humans. Thus not until the early mod-
ern age of the Tokugawa period did the Japanese turn, literally for the
first time, to the aesthetic delights of the nude, as we can observe them
so finely revealed in the work of Utamaro and other masters of ukiyo-e.

One of Utamaro’s contemporaries was a mysterious genius named
Toshusai Sharaku (dates unknown). Almost nothing is known with cer-
tainty about Sharaku ’s identity or activities apart from the astonishing fact
that he did his entire corpus of surviving work — some 145 prints, mostly
of kabuki actors — during a concentrated period of less than ten months
in 1794. Whereas Utamaro specialized in pictures of the courtesan, Sha-
raku was the master chronicler of the actor (fig. 59). Both artists had a
penchant for doing close-up, bustlike portraits of their subjects, and both
frequently left the backgrounds of their prints blank; otherwise, they had
virtually nothing in common. Utamaro’s prints are sophisticated and re-
strained, with composition and coloring precise. Sharaku s, by compar-
ison, are stylistically crude. His colors sometimes clash and he seems to
lack the sureness of placement of his subject matter that is so character-
istic of Japanese artists. But these ostensible failings seem only to enhance
Sharaku’s forte: the bursting, elemental energy he has infused into his
actors, whose faces and bodies are contorted with dramatic emotion.
Unlike most ukiyo-e artists, Sharaku sought to portray real people, not
simply stereotypes. It has even been speculated that he stopped produc-
ing prints so abruptly because actors were outraged at being so unflatter-
ingly drawn. This seems absurd, since no other artist has ever captured
the spirit of kabuki as Sharaku did, and it seems much more likely that
the actors he drew fully appreciated having their dramatic skills depicted
in such a vivid, exciting manner.

Before ending this chapter, much of which deals with the lives and
pursuits of the denizens of the pleasure quarters, let me say a few words
about one habitue of the quarters who not only embodied much of
its style and spirit but even today is internationally known as a unique
product of Japanese culture, the geisha or “person of accomplishment.”
The geisha first appeared in the mid-Tokugawa period (the earliest
recorded use of the term geisha is 1751). Originally, geisha were men,

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

203

Fig. 59 Otani Oniji III as Edohei by Sharaku (Art
Institute of Chicago)

but gradually they became exclusively female. Although most geisha
worked in the pleasure quarters or “floating worlds,” they were also con-
sidered to occupy, in a sense, their own realm, called the “flower and
willow world” (karyukai).

Geisha were entertainers, skilled as singers, dancers, storytellers, and
conversationalists, who were employed at parties and other social affairs
primarily to entertain men. There was supposed to be a clear distinction
between geisha on the one hand and courtesans and the other, lesser
prostitutes on the other. Geisha were expected to be strictly entertainers
and not engage in the business of sexually gratifying men. But the dis-
tinction between entertainment and sex was not always precisely main-
tained, and some geisha even became the concubines or mistresses of
men who purchased their contracts from the masters who held them in
bondage. Although the Tokugawa government frequently directed the
geisha not to compete with prostitutes, even seeking to restrict the luxu-

204

The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

riousness of their style of dressing and encouraging plain and older
women to become geisha, the problem of geisha and the sex business
persisted.

Later in the Tokugawa period, free-lance geisha pursued their profes-
sion outside the pleasure quarters, securing for themselves much greater
freedom of movement and activity. Some, like leading courtesans of the
pleasure quarters, acquired considerable fame, and some even became
the fashion setters for women.

The musical instrument par excellence of the geisha was the samisen ,
which, as we have seen, also enlivened the kabuki and puppet theatres.
Even today, nothing can evoke the feeling and mood of the world of
entertainment and pleasure of Tokugawa times like the brittle twanging
of the samisen, especially as played by geisha . Although the profession of
geisha has declined greatly in modern times, some geisha have been suc-
cessful working in the political world. These geisha are engaged to enter-
tain at parties of leading politicians, where the sake flows freely and some-
times important political negotiations are conducted. Although geisha
are supposed to remain silent about what they hear at these affairs, it is
interesting that the leading political parties tend to patronize their own
groups of geisha.2*

Heterodox Trends

The Tokugawa system of rule was shaped by the first three shoguns,
who ruled from 1600 until 1651. During this half century the shogunate
pursued policies — including national seclusion, alternate attendance, and
the confiscation (on the one hand) and transfer (on the other hand) of
daimyo domains — that increasingly strengthened its control over both the
daimyos and the country as a whole. Some scholars have speculated that
if the shogunate had continued on the same course it would have trans-
formed itself from a rather loose, hegemonic government into a central-
ized monarchy.1 But, after 1651, what appeared to be a drive toward ever
greater centralization of power ceased, and during the remaining two cen-
turies of Tokugawa rule the shogunate in fact allowed many of the powers
it had accumulated to slip away.

The post- 165 1 shogunate became a highly conservative regime, com-
mitted to traditional policies and practices and generally unwilling to
consider serious or fundamental change to its way of governance. Yet
shogunate conservatism, although it led to the meting out of harsh pun-
ishments to some dissidents, by no means stifled all diversity and change.
The flourishing of a bourgeois culture, for example, brought the modifi-
cation or alteration of many of the traditional canons of taste in Japanese
literature, theatre, and the visual arts. In philosophy, too, scholars ex-
pressed much diversity of opinion, often in opposition to Chu Hsi Neo-
Confucianism, which, as we have seen, was officially championed as an
orthodoxy by the shogunate from at least the late seventeenth century
through its patronage of the Hayashi family of Confucian scholars.

The blossoming of philosophy as a field of study was one of the most
striking developments of the Tokugawa period. Although the Japanese
had contributed much to Buddhist theology before Tokugawa, as observ-
able in the careers and writings of men such as Kukai, Shinran, and
Dogen, they had done little in philosophy. Indeed, one would be hard
pressed to name a single Japanese “philosopher” for the period before
Tokugawa. One reason for the advancement of philosophy as a field after
1 600 was the quest by the Tokugawa to legitimize their rule — that is, to
justify or have recognized as “right” what they had achieved by military

206

Heterodox Trends

“might.” After early experimentation with both Buddhist and Shinto
rationales for rulership, the Tokugawa settled on Chu Hsi Neo-Confu-
cianism, which provided an ideology that, as we have seen, could be inter-
preted as sanctifying both the Tokugawa regime and its social class struc-
ture as based on laws that were as immutable as those of nature itself. As
Hayashi Razan put it:

Heaven is above and earth is below. ... [I]n everything there is an order
separating those above and those below . . . , [and] we cannot allow disorder
in the relations between ruler and subject, between those above and those
below. The separation into four classes of samurai, farmers, artisans and
merchants, like the five relationships, is part of the principles of heaven and is
he Way which was taught by the Sage (Confucius).2

The first important scholar to challenge the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy
was Nakae Toju (1608-48). After serving in his youth as a samurai
retainer, Toju denounced the rigidities of such service and retired at the
early age of twenty-six to a life of study and contemplation at his birth-
place on Lake Biwa in Omi Province. As a scholar, Toju had at first been
a keen student of Chu Hsi Neo-Confucianism, but from his observation
of people of all classes in Japan he came to question whether certain of
its basic tenets were truly meaningful when applied to them. Neo-Con-
fucianism, for one thing, endorsed a hierarchical structuring of society in
which all people were expected to accept without question the obligations
attendant upon predominantly inferior-superior relations among men.
But was it proper for the ruling class of Tokugawa Japan to enjoy its
privileges solely on the basis of birth rather than, as in China, on intel-
lectual or scholarly merit?

At an even more fundamental level, Toju questioned the orthodox
Neo-Confucian view of moral perfectibility. According to this view, as
we have seen, human nature is basically good and is governed by ri or
reason. Although there is the danger that one’s ki (ether or substance)
may, through cravings and passions, obscure ri, if one’s basic nature is
properly cultivated through moral training, one will invariably act in a
good and upright fashion. Toju observed that, despite their claim that
people should be allowed to act with complete freedom once their inher-
ently moral nature has been cultivated, the orthodox Neo-Confucianists
in fact made sure of right action by dictating elaborate rules of social
conduct.

Toju asserted that the most important consideration was man’s mind
or will to action (shin). In other words, whereas the orthodox Neo-Con-
fucianists talked about the ri- nature and prescribed how man should
behave to prove that he had it, Toju said that man should act according
to the dictates of his mind or “intuition,” and should not be fettered by
the need to conform to arbitrary norms of social behavior. The creed he

Heterodox Trends

207

thus espoused was formally based on the writings of the Ming dynasty
philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529). The Neo-Confucianism of
Wang Yang-ming, which stressed that man had the inherent or intuitive
capacity to act morally, held a powerful attraction for many Japanese of
the Tokugawa period, especially samurai whose class background and
outlook made them logically receptive to a doctrine of personal indepen-
dence and direct action. Yet, the Wang Yang-ming emphasis on intuition
was also close to the spirit of Zen Buddhism and, toward the end of his
life, Nakae Toju became less concerned with social action than with the
cultivation of a Zen-like inner tranquility. It remained for others, partic-
ularly in the tumultuous final years of the Tokugawa period, to employ
Wang Yang-ming Neo-Confucianism as a rationale for political activism.

Another group of scholars who attacked the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy
was the so-called School of Ancient Studies (kogaku-ha). The leading
members of the kogaku-ha had such diverse personalities and viewpoints
that it may at first seem inappropriate to group them together as a
school. Nevertheless, they were similar at least insofar as each sought to
go back beyond Neo-Confucianism — and indeed beyond all the major
accretions to Confucianism of the preceding two millennia — to rediscover
the original teachings of the Confucian tradition. The Neo-Confucianists
in China had started out to do the very same thing and had ended in
producing intellectual syntheses that were far removed from the down-to-
earth humanism of Confucianism and the sages of early China. The
Ancient Studies scholars of Tokugawa Japan also differed widely in their
interpretations of what constituted the original teachings of Confucianism
and how they should be applied to the conditions of their own country
and age.

The first major figure of the Ancient Studies school was Yamaga Soko
(1622-85). Of samurai origin, Soko earned a reputation as a brilliant
scholar, delving into such varied subjects as Shinto, Buddhism, and Japa-
nese poetry, as well as Confucianism, which he studied in Edo under
Hayashi Razan. Soko was also greatly interested in military science, and
it was probably this interest as much as anything that eventually led him
to attack the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy as irrelevant to Japan in the
seventeenth century. He observed that Confucius had lived during an age
when conditions in China were far closer to the feudal system of Toku-
gawa Japan than to the centralized bureaucratic state for which the Neo-
Confucianists of the Sung dynasty had shaped their doctrines. Sokd
accordingly believed that, rather than the metaphysically based and overly
idealistic tenets of orthodox Neo-Confucianism, the practical ethics for
everyday living that Confucius had preached should be used for the moral
training of the Japanese of his time.

Soko was also one of the first thinkers of the Tokugawa period to
address himself to the problem of justifying the existence of the samurai

208

Heterodox Trends

as a largely idle, stipendiary class. After the founding of the Tokugawa
shogunate in 1 600, there had been little opportunity for the samurai to
pursue their principal calling, and it became a historical anomaly that a
class of fighting men should preside over Japan during its longest age of
peace. Some samurai became bureaucratic administrators of the shogun-
ate and han governments, but others had very little in the way of formal
assignments or responsibilities to occupy their time. In the first provisions
of its “Laws for the Military Houses,” issued in 1615, the shogunate had
enjoined the samurai to pursue with single-minded devotion the arts of
“peace and war”; and it was in line with this injunction that Soko for-
mulated his code for samurai conduct. Observing that “the samurai eat
food without growing it, use utensils without manufacturing them, and
profit without buying or selling,” Soko asked what justified the existence
of the samurai as a class. His answer was that “the business of the samurai
consists in reflecting on his own station in life, in discharging loyal ser-
vice to his master if he has one, in deepening his fidelity in associations
with friends, and, with due consideration of his own position, in devoting
himself to duty above all.”3 Thus, according to Soko, the samurai was to
serve as an exemplar of high moral purpose for Japanese of all classes.
Central to this moral purpose was the samurai’s commitment to “duty
above all.” In one sense, this duty or giri was the same giri we noticed
affecting the behavior of townsman characters in the domestic plays of
Chikamatsu. When set forth by Yamaga Soko as a moral imperative for
the samurai, however, it implied an absolute loyalty to one’s overlord and
devotion to duty that far transcended what could realistically be expected
of members of the other classes of Tokugawa society.

On the basis of views such as these, Yamaga Soko is generally credited
as the formulator of the code of bushidd > or the “way of the warrior.”4
Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a
member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently
illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.

Yamaga Soko is also famous for having been, at one time, the teacher
of Oishi Kuranosuke (1659-1703), leader of the famed “forty-seven
ronin. n The story of the forty-seven ronin , probably the best-loved story
in Japanese history, has been recreated countless times in many media,
including the puppet theatre, kabuki , novels, and the cinema (fig. 60).
Its “meaning” or “meanings” have been endlessly debated from the time
that the ronin carried out their vendetta in 1702 until the present day.
One Japanese scholar has even suggested, rather hyperbolically, that “if
you study Chushingura [the ronin story] long enough, you will under-
stand everything about the Japanese.”5 Let us pause to examine the ronin
story in some detail.

In 1701 Lord Asano, daimyo of the Ako domain in western Japan,
was assigned to perform ceremonial duty at the shogun’s court in Edo.

Heterodox Trends

209

Fig. 60 “View of Loyal Ako Samurai Breaking into Kira’s Mansion,” by Shirai
Toshinobu, depicting a scene from the story of the forty-seven ronin (Honolulu
Academy of Arts, Bequest of Norman D. Hill , 1938 [10,953])

On the last day of his duty, Asano attacked a shogunate official named
Kira and wounded, but did not kill, him. Having violated a strict rule of
the shogunate about drawing a weapon at court, Asano was ordered to
commit suicide by disembowelment (seppuku) that very afternoon. No
one knows precisely why Asano attacked Kira. He said something about
a “grudge” before the attack, but after the attack, so far as we know, he
went to his death in silence.

Upon Asano’s death, all of his vassals automatically became ronin or
masterless samurai. Ultimately, forty-seven of them, headed by Oishi
Kuranosuke, joined in a secret pledge to avenge their deceased lord.
Late in 1702, nearly two years later, they fulfilled this pledge by attacking
and killing Kira at his residence in Edo.

During the long period between Asano’s assault on Kira and the ronin1 s
destruction of him, there had arisen a major division of opinion among
the ronin over how to proceed.6 One group, with Oishi Kuranosuke as its
spokesman, gave first priority to saving the Asano house and its property,
holding that the matter could be considered settled — that is, personal
revenge against Kira would not be necessary — if the shogunate allowed
Asano’s younger brother to succeed to his title and estate. But another
group was intent from the outset upon avenging their lord by killing Kira.
Only when it became clear that the shogunate would not agree to con-
tinuation of the Asano house did the two groups come together to carry
out their violent act of revenge.

Those among the ronin who all along insisted upon killing Kira did so,
according to Eiko Ikegami, primarily because of their determination to

210

Heterodox Trends

remove the stain to their personal honor caused by a clash that resulted
in the death of their lord but not the other party. The fact that they did
not even know why their lord attacked the other party was immaterial to
them. Their determination stemmed from the ancient honor tradition of
the samurai.

After a lively debate among officials, intellectuals, and others about
how to deal with the rdniny the shogunate decided that they must die
because they broke “public” law. The ronin were, however, granted the
privilege of dying honorable deaths by seppuku (rather than decapita-
tion).7 Although people at the time may have differed in their opinions
about the shogunate’s decision to punish the ronin for their “public” be-
havior, nearly everyone appears to have agreed that their “private”
behavior as samurai had been exemplary. Some Japanese even glorified
the ronin in death as gijin or “men of high moral purpose.” Such glorifi-
cation was in keeping with Yamaga Soko’s idea of bushido , according to
which the samurai of Tokugawa times should serve as exemplars of loyalty
and morality. But whereas Soko conceived loyalty and morality in Con-
fucian terms, the revenge-conscious ronin (if we follow Ikegami’s anal-
ysis) were motivated largely by more particularistic, feudal sentiments of
personal honor and loyalty. Their main concern was about their honor
and their loyalty, not about honor and loyalty as universal ideals.

The ronin story was produced on the stage of the puppet theatre with-
in weeks of the attack on Kira; and although the shogunate banned it, it
proved to be only the first of an endless stream of theatrical and other ver-
sions of the story. Of theatrical versions, the 1748 puppet play Chushin-
gura (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers)* established itself as the most popular,
and indeed the name “Chushingura” became, and remains today, synony-
mous with the entire cultural phenomenon of the forty-seven ronin.

Why, we may ask, did the ronin story become so immediately and last-
ingly popular? For one thing, of course, it was an inherently exciting,
suspenseful story. But to the contemporary Japanese of the early eigh-
teenth century who started the Chushingura craze, the story of the ronin
surely aroused feelings deeper than simply the reactions one might have
to an exciting, suspenseful story.

The time was the Genroku epoch. Japan had been at peace almost
uninterruptedly for a century. The economy, from its agricultural base
to urban commerce, had expanded steadily and, in many respects, dra-
matically throughout this period. More people had more money and
more leisure time than ever before, and Genroku itself became a byword
for the cultural flourishing of a consumer society. Peace, prosperity, lei-
sure time, and consumerism had, over the years, eroded the martial spirit
of the samurai, who had not had wars to fight for generations. Some
people may even have wondered why anyone was still allowed to be a
samurai. Then, suddenly, came the astounding news that forty-seven

Heterodox Trends

211

ronin had risked everything — the wrath of the shogunate, their lives,
their families — to avenge their lord.

Revenge, in the form of the vendetta (katakiuchi) , was a practice that
was, in fact, tacitly approved, if not encouraged, by the Tokugawa sho-
gunate, which allowed government agencies at various levels to authorize
vendettas. But of the authorized vendettas that have come down to us in
the records, virtually all were undertaken by people on behalf of their
relatives — for example, the revenge of a son against the murderer of his
father. The “revenge” of the forty-seven ronin, as people at the time were
quick to point out, was not authorized and, indeed, was not even a ven-
detta inasmuch as Kira had not killed anyone but had himself been the
victim of attempted murder. Nevertheless, whether or not Kira was a
proper object of revenge, the ronin were certainly motivated by its spirit
and, in the Japanese tradition, came to be idolized as the supreme
avengers.

The 1748 puppet play Chushingura , while of course based on the ronin
story, is a vastly elaborated and complex tale with many subplots that in-
cludes an array of fictional characters in addition to the ronin themselves.
Perhaps most striking about this tale is that, despite its complexity of plot,
it has been thoroughly cleansed of all the ambiguities of the historical
events of 1701-2. The ronin and others who support them are, from start
to finish, motivated by only two sentiments: loyalty (for their lord) and
revenge. The Kira character9 is a thoroughly despicable, evil man whose
death cannot come too soon, and the ronin, led by the Kuranosuke char-
acter, do not for a moment think about saving their lord’s house, their
personal honor, or anything other than revenge. They plan, moreover, to
cap their vendetta — the killing of the Kira character — with the ultimate
act of loyalty, their own suicides. The play says nothing about the rdnin
being arrested by the shogunate and awaiting a decision about their fate.
Instead, it ends with them setting off to the temple where their lord is
buried to commit suicide before his grave.

I believe that much, if not most, of the popularity of the forty-seven
rdnin story and the impetus that transformed it into the Chushingura
legend derived from the fact that, at a time (the Genroku epoch) when
the samurai spirit was thought to be at its nadir, a group of rdnin acted
in accordance with what was perceived to be its finest values. Chushin-
gura, although obviously known to be a largely fictionalized version of the
ronin story, removed all the shadings and motivational uncertainties from
the story and rendered it a pure celebration of the samurai way.

At least one contemporary of the rdnin, however, was not impressed
with even their private behavior: Yamamoto Tsunetomo, a samurai from
a Kyushu domain whose stories, advice, sayings, and injunctions were
compiled and issued in 1716 under the title of Hagakure. Tsunetomo’s
complaint about the ronin was that they did not act immediately after their

212

Heterodox Trends

lord’s death, but waited almost two years. For Tsunetomo, delay, either
because of hesitation or for the purpose of plotting or scheming, was ana-
thema. The samurai way, he asserts in Hagakure, demands immediate
action in all crises, action that the samurai should always anticipate — in-
deed expect — will lead to his death. Here is how Tsunetomo recom-
mends that a samurai carry out revenge:

The way of revenge lies simply in forcing one’s way into a place and being cut
down. There is no shame in this. By thinking that you must complete the job
you will run out of time. By considering things like how many men the enemy
has, time piles up. . . . No matter if the enemy has thousands of men, there is
fulfillment in simply standing them off and being determined to cut them all
down.10

Tsunetomo further expounds on what we might call the rule of imme-
diate action in this passage:

When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. . . . Above all, the
Way of the Samurai should be in being aware that you do not know what is
going to happen next. . . . Victory and defeat are matters of the temporary
force of circumstances. The way of avoiding shame is different. It is simply in
death. Even if it is certain that you will lose, retaliate. Neither wisdom or
technique has a place in this. A real man does not think of victory or defeat.
He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will
awaken from your dreams.11

In speaking about plunging recklessly toward an irrational death, Tsune-
tomo refers to what he identifies as shinigurui or “death frenzy,” Death
frenzy calls upon the samurai, when faced with a crisis or even an uncer-
tain situation, to enter into what can only be described as a self-induced
state of psychosis in which only action — not goals or purpose — matters.

With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality — to the point of psy-
chosis— Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist
years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as
something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist
writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its
values.12

In studying both Hagakure and the story of the forty-seven ronin , we
should note in particular the distinction, already adumbrated, that we
find drawn between the concept of samurai loyalty, on the one hand, and
samurai honor, on the other. True samurai loyalty meant total commit-
ment to one’s lord, manifested primarily by acting in accordance with
what was, or at least could be judged as, best for him. In that regard,
Oishi Kuranosuke and the others among the ronin who wished above all
to save the Asano house were surely loyal to the spirit of their dead lord,
even though such loyalty might mean a diminution of their honor because
they did not take personal revenge against Kira. Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Heterodox Trends

213

was certainly a staunch advocate of loyalty, and says much about it Haga-
kure. He does not, however, address the question of what the samurai
should do if loyalty conflicted with personal honor, as it did in the case
of the forty-seven ronin when some of them rejected loyalty if it meant
dropping plans to kill Kira (and thus losing honor) in order to save the
Asano house.

Tsunetomo’s central concern was, in fact, not at all with loyalty but
with honor. We can observe this, for example, in the above two quota-
tions from Hagakure in which he stresses avoidance of shame, the mortal
enemy of honor, above all else. His criticism of the forty-seven ronin was
that they did not act immediately. To satisfy him, the ronin should have
launched an immediate attack on Kira’s residence even though it was
then extremely well guarded in anticipation of just such an action. The
ronin would all have been slaughtered, the Asano house’s hopes would
have been dashed, but the forty-seven would, through their death frenzy,
have preserved their personal, entirely selfish honor.

Let us return to Yamaga Soko. In addition to his writings on the way
of the warrior, Soko is also remembered for his stress on another theme,
the greatness of Japan, that was to endear him to later nationalists of the
modern period.

The study of Confucianism naturally imbued Japanese scholars with a
greater or lesser degree of enthusiasm for the civilization of China: some
became outright Sinophiles, and although other Confucian scholars of
the early Tokugawa period, including Hayashi Razan, had gone beyond
their study of Chinese philosophy to investigate Shinto and the Japanese
tradition, Yamaga Soko was the first thinker of stature to claim the supe-
riority of Japanese culture and ethical values over those of China. By
exalting the sacred origins of Japan and by claiming that Japan, rather
than China, should be regarded as the Middle Kingdom of the world,
Soko gave early voice to an attitude that was to gain wide acceptance after
the rise to prominence in the eighteenth century of the Neo-Shintoist
School of National Learning (kokugaku-ha) .

Another outstanding scholar of the Ancient Studies school was Ogyu
Sorai (1666-1728), who went even farther back into Chinese history than
Soko to find the “true” Confucian way in the age of ancient sages who
lived before Confucius. Yamaga Soko had criticized the abstract Neo-
Confucian stress on cultivating man’s inherently moral nature and had
urged the inculcation of more practical, “fundamental” ethics as a means
for maintaining social order in Tokugawa Japan. But both Soko and the
Neo-Confucianists were, in the best Confucian tradition, interested
chiefly in the subject of morality. Ogyu Sorai, on the other hand, paid
less attention to morality than to the legal and institutional controls nec-
essary for governing society.

Although there were antecedents for it in Confucianism, Sorai ’s greater

214

Heterodox Trends

emphasis on controlling men than on trying to elevate them to the uto-
pian state where they would be sufficiently moral to exist without external
controls is generally associated with schools of thought in China other
than the Confucian. That Ogyu Sorai should take such a position was in
part a response to new social and political problems that beset Toku-
gawa society about the time of the Genroku epoch and in part simply a
reflection of the strongly practical, pragmatic approach of many hetero-
dox thinkers of this age.

Many of the problems that the Tokugawa shogunate encountered as it
approached its second century were the result of what today we would
call progress. The shogunate, for one thing, was increasingly perplexed
about how to deal with the great flourishing of commerce that peace and
tranquility brought. While the townsmen enjoyed to the fullest their Gen-
roku prosperity, the shogunate and the samurai class in general, still over-
whelmingly dependent on agriculture for income, found themselves more
and more financially hard-pressed as the result of market fluctuations and
the inflationary drift of the times. In 1695 the shogunate even resorted to
the desperate expediency of currency debasement in an attempt to solve
its financial difficulties.

Another problem that troubled the shogunate was bureaucratization.
The Tokugawa shogunate had been founded on the basis of direct mili-
tary controls to govern a country that in 1600 had known only warfare
for generations. The original structure of the shogunate, although it
proved to be remarkably durable, was inevitably altered and expanded
with the passage of time to meet changing conditions. One of the most
important changes was in the office of shogun. The three great founding
shoguns, who ruled until 1651, had been personally dominant figures.
But with the growth in complexity of shogunate affairs and the appear-
ance of weak men in the hereditary line of its headship, the shogun’s
powers often came to be exercised by others, and open struggles over
these powers among men and groups within the shogunate became in-
creasingly frequent. Although a particularly strong-willed shogun could
still exert his personal influence, the tendency toward a diffusion of power
(apparently characteristic of all bureaucracies) can be observed in the his-
tory of the Tokugawa shogunate from the late seventeenth century on.

It was precisely to the question of strengthening the shogunate institu-
tionally in order to meet the new demands of the eighteenth century that
the Ancient Studies scholar Ogyu Sorai turned his attention. And it is
interesting to note that shogunate authorities were not so enamored of the
orthodox Neo-Confucianist view of the Tokugawa government as a purely
moral agent that they did not lend an attentive ear to the heterodox, legal-
istic views of Sorai.

Although I have stressed that one of the features common to many
heterodox thinkers of the Tokugawa period was their desire to approach

Heterodox Trends

215

things in a more direct and rational fashion, it should be noted that cer-
tain scholars who remained within the Neo-Confucian orthodoxy exhib-
ited a similar bent. The best example is Arai Hakuseki (1657-1725), a
ronin who served as the personal adviser to two shoguns from 1 709 until
1715. Hakuseki was noted for certain bold and forceful policies he initi-
ated, including his efforts to restore the value of the coinage after the
currency debasement of 1695, to revise the shogunate’s “Laws for the
Military Houses,” and to restrict the outflow of gold and silver bullion
from Japan through the foreign trade with the Dutch and Chinese at
Nagasaki. But, from the standpoint of cultural history, Hakuseki’s ratio-
nalism is best observed in the field of pure scholarship, where he wrote
books on such wide-ranging subjects as archaeology, sociology, philology,
history, and even conditions in the West.

In all of his scholarly work, Hakuseki exhibited a degree of rationality
and a quest for empirical evidence that make his writings valuable sec-
ondary reference sources even today. When dealing with Japan’s prehis-
tory, for example, he urged the investigation of Chinese and Korean
accounts of early Japan and not simply acceptance of the mythical ver-
sions of the country’s origins as recorded in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki
of the eighth century. In perhaps his best-known work, Observations on
History (Dokushi Yoron), Hakuseki presented a careful analysis in terms of
cause and effect of Japanese history from the time of the establishment
of the Fujiwara regency in the Heian period until Hideyoshi’s unification
of the country in the late sixteenth century (with particular emphasis on
the rise of the military class to preeminence).

Whereas Arai Hakuseki employed techniques of historical methodol-
ogy that we would consider quite modern, other scholars of the early and
mid-Tokugawa period undertook histories of Japan of a more traditional
kind, written in Chinese and based on classical Chinese models of textual
organization. One of these was The Comprehensive Mirror of Our Country
(Honcho Tsugan)13 of the Hayashi family; another was The History of Great
Japan (Dai Nihon Shi)> compiled by a school for historical studies estab-
lished in the Mito han. The Mito work, which was not actually completed
until 1906, is a chronicle of Japan’s imperial line from the time of the
mythical founding of the state by the first emperor in 660 b.c. until uni-
fication of the Northern and Southern Courts in 1392. Strongly moral-
istic in tone, it was greatly admired by loyalists of the late Tokugawa
period, who attacked the shogunate and urged a restoration of the em-
peror to power. In fact, the early Mito scholars, whose daimyo was related
to the Tokugawa family, had by no means intended their history to be
subversive of the shogunate. Nevertheless, The History of Great Japan ,
which stresses the continuity and sanctity of the imperial institution in
Japanese history, greatly aroused the nationalistic sentiments of those who
finally carried out the Meiji Restoration of 1868.

216

Heterodox Trends

Another source of inspiration for the loyalists of the Meiji Restoration
was the collected writings of the School of National Learning (kokugaku-
ha). This school arose in the eighteenth century as an antiquarian liter-
ary movement whose members investigated such ancient masterpieces
as the Man \ ydshu and The Tale of Genji in the search for a true and original
Japanese spirit untainted by those alien systems of thought and behavior,
including Buddhism and Confucianism, that had been introduced to
Japan from China during the previous thousand years (see the discussion
of this in Chapter 1).

Despite its inflammatory appeal to later imperial loyalists, the National
Learning movement in its origins was not a radical or aberrant phenom-
enon at all but a logical development in Japanese intellectual history that
owed much to the various schools of Tokugawa Confucianism. The fore-
runners of the movement, participating in the general upsurge in scholar-
ship stimulated by Confucianism in the seventeenth century, undertook
philological studies into the origins of the Japanese language that paved
the way for the subsequent work of the two leading National Learning
scholars of the eighteenth century, Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769) and
Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801).

Kamo Mabuchi, the son of a functionary at a Shinto shrine who rose
to become lecturer to the head of a branch family of the Tokugawa, was
much taken with the At an 'ydshu and asserted that the poems of this
eighth-century anthology were imbued with the true spirit of the Japa-
nese. He identified this spirit as one of pure naturalness, spontaneity, and
manly vigor, and charged that the influx of Chinese culture into Japan
had perverted it to a way of life, exemplified by the courtiers of the Heian
period, that was both artificial and effeminate. Mabuchi urged people to
compose poems in the manner of the Man'yoshu and thereby seek to re-
capture or “restore” the native temper of ancient times. As we have seen,
restorationism — that is, the desire to return to an earlier, golden age in
history — was also a strong sentiment among scholars of the Ancient
Studies school, although some Sinophiles among them, like Ogyu Sorai,
may have wished to revive only the conditions of ancient China. Kamo
Mabuchi, on the other hand, insisted unequivocally that the golden age
to be sought in the past was a Japanese age.

Although he only met Kamo Mabuchi once, Motoori Norinaga
claimed to be his true disciple and never directly challenged Mabuchi’s
glorification of the Man'ydshu as the repository of the original Japanese
spirit. But Norinaga’s own investigation into courtier literature, especially
The Tale of Genji and the Shinkokinshu, led him to adopt a quite different
view of that spirit. Norinaga believed that the most important quality
native to the Japanese was their sensitivity, as embodied in the term mono
no aware . He attacked what he regarded as the excessive rationalism of the
Confucianists and claimed that the Japanese were fundamentally an emo-

Heterodox Trends

217

tional people. To his mind, The Tale of Genji was a classical delineation
of this emotionalism as it revealed itself in the courtier society of the
Heian period. In contrast to Kamo Mabuchi, Norinaga thus extolled the
highly refined, indeed effeminate, sensibility that characterized the
behavior of individuals in The Tale of Genji and the poems of the thir-
teenth-century Shinkokinshu and proclaimed it to be the finest product of
Japanese civilization.

Let us look more closely into Norinaga’s idea of Shinto emotionalism.
In one of his discussions of The Tale of Genjiy Norinaga describes the
basic character of this emotionalism by analyzing the concepts of good
and evil in terms of mono no aware. But whereas in the conventional use
of mono no aware as an aesthetic term, as discussed in Chapter 3, its
meaning is something on the order of a “sensitivity to things” or a “capa-
city to be moved by things,” Norinaga, in the following passage about the
Genji , uses it in a more narrow, psychological sense to connote (in the apt
phrasing of the translator) “awareness of the poignancy or sorrow of
human existence”:

Then what is good or evil in the realm of human psychology and ethics
according to the Tale of Genji? Generally speaking, those who know the mean-
ing of the sorrow of human existence, i.e., those who are in sympathy and in
harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as good; and those who are
not aware of the poignancy of human existence, i.e., those who are not in
sympathy and not in harmony with human sentiments, are regarded as bad.14

Turning to the character of Genji in The Tale of Genji , Norinaga notes
that, from the standpoint of Confucianism and Buddhism, Genji — the
womanizer par excellence — is guilty of “acts of extraordinary iniquity and
immorality.” But The Tale of Genji , rather than developing this theme,
instead stresses Genji’s “goodness” as one who is profoundly aware of the
sorrow of human existence:

The purpose of the Tale of Genji may be likened to the man who, loving the
lotus flower, must collect and store muddy and foul water in order to plant
and cultivate the flower. The impure mud of illicit love affairs described in
the Tale is there not for the purpose of being admired but for the purpose of
nurturing the flower of the awareness of the sorrow of human existence.
Prince Genji’s conduct is like the lotus flower which is happy and fragrant
but which has its roots in filthy muddy water. But the Tale does not dwell on
the impurity of the water; it dwells on those who are sympathetically kind and
who are aware of the sorrow of human existence, and it holds these feelings
to be the basis of the good man.15

In an effort to get to the origins of the Japanese tradition, Norinaga
also went back beyond Mabuchi’s much-esteemed Man ’yoshit to under-
take research on the oldest extant Japanese book, the Kojiki. Whereas the
Nihon Shoki was composed in Chinese and had been studied by courtier

218

Heterodox Trends

scholars through the centuries, the Kojiki was so complexly written by
means of Chinese characters to reproduce Japanese sounds that it had
long been regarded as almost indecipherable. In what was one of the
greatest achievements of scholarship in Japanese history, Norinaga de-
voted nearly thirty-five years to an analysis and annotated translation of
the Kojiki . The end result is a testament to the exceptionally high stan-
dards of scholarly work that had been cultivated in Japan by the eigh-
teenth century.

Although Norinaga approached his translation of the Kojiki with an
attitude of strict scholarly neutrality, his personal interest in the work
went beyond the cultural to the religious. He sought, in fact, to establish
the Kojiki as a basic scripture of Shinto. Norinaga’s own theology was
founded on absolute faith in the native kami of Japan. Rejecting the vari-
ous Shinto schools that had emerged in the medieval age and that had
absorbed varying amounts of Buddhism, Confucianism, and sundry Chi-
nese lore, Norinaga insisted that the ways of the kami were inscrutable
and that the accounts of them in such writings as the Kojiki and Nihon
Shoki must be accepted as gospel.

Enriched by the great contribution of Motoori Norinaga, the National
Learning movement evolved in several directions during the late Toku-
gawa period. Some scholars continued to devote themselves to Japanese
literature and history; others gave their attention chiefly to the Shintoist
elements in National Learning; and still others moved into the field of
political activism and became advocates of imperial restoration.

By far the most influential member of the National Learning (or Neo-
Shintoist) movement of the early nineteenth century was Hirata Atsutane
(1776-1843). Atsutane never had the opportunity to meet Motoori Nori-
naga, but he deeply venerated the work of the older master and always
claimed that he was Norinaga’s true successor. Nevertheless, Atsutane
was of a very different temperament and outlook from Norinaga. He was,
for one thing, a fiery Shintoist and Japanophile, who reviled alien teach-
ings and foreign countries in order to glorify the superiority of Japan and
its native learning. Norinaga had combined impeccable scholarship with
an abiding religious faith (even though we may regard as excessively naive
his acceptance of the mythical accounts of the age of the gods as literally
true); Atsutane, on the other hand, seems never to have hesitated to inter-
pret and even to distort things to suit his purposes.

Two examples may be given to illustrate Atsutane’s penchant for spe-
cious argument. First, he asserted that the reason the ancient Japanese
had not articulated a Way of virtuous behavior (that is, a Way like Con-
fucianism), as the early Chinese had, was that they had been inherently
virtuous and had felt no need consciously to identify and preach virtue.
Second, Atsutane contended that the Japanese failure to develop the art
of medicine independently stemmed from the fact that, unlike China and

Heterodox Trends

219

the Western countries, Japan had originally been pure and without
disease and hence did not need medicines. Only after contact with the
outside world were the Japanese also afflicted with diseases and obliged
to seek remedies for them.

Atsutane possessed a wide knowledge of many subjects, including the
Western learning of the scholars of Dutch Studies (rangaku); in fact, his
remarks about medicine were made in spite of (or because of?) a consid-
erable familiarity with Western advances in the field of medicine. Atsu-
tane’s religious views may also have been influenced by Christianity, even
though that foreign creed had been rigorously proscribed throughout the
Tokugawa period. With the rise of Dutch Studies in the eighteenth cen-
tury, some knowledge of Christianity inevitably filtered once again into
Japan despite efforts by the authorities to prevent it. Atsutane’s stress on
the central importance of a Shinto god of creativity and his belief in a
rather pleasant sounding, if vaguely defined, Shinto afterworld may both
have been partly or wholly derived from Christianity. His positing of an
afterworld was in particular an innovation for Shinto, which had always
been notably deficient in such speculation.

The last major movement of heterodox learning in the Tokugawa
period was the school of Dutch Studies. We have seen that, although the
Japanese had engaged in a century of intercourse with Europeans, par-
ticularly the Portuguese, from the 1540s until the late 1630s, much of
the Western knowledge they acquired in that period was lost during the
anti-Christian persecutions that accompanied implementation of the
national seclusion policy. From 1641 on, only the Dutch among Euro-
peans were permitted to trade with Japan; and the Dutch, who shared the
limited Japanese foreign trade at Nagasaki with the Chinese, were virtu-
ally quarantined from all but a few officials and interpreters who dealt
with them at their compound on the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki
Harbor.

There was little opportunity under the seclusion policy, therefore, for
the Japanese to gain access to Western knowledge. Most of the Dutch at
Nagasaki were dour tradesmen who were concerned only with making a
profit, and the linguistic talents of the Nagasaki interpreters (both in Por-
tuguese, which remained the lingua franca of communication with the
foreigners until the end of the seventeenth century, and in Dutch) were
so limited as to make serious exchange with the Hollanders almost impos-
sible. Even so, sufficient information about Dutch superiority in scien-
tific, and especially medical, knowledge did seep out of Nagasaki to
stimulate the imaginations of some Japanese scholars. One reason why
Western medicine became the object of particular interest among the
Japanese was that the doctors regularly assigned to the Dutch contingent
at Nagasaki were, unlike the Dutch traders, often men of broad intellec-
tual background and curiosity. One was the German physician Englebert

220

Heterodox Trends

Kaempfer (1651-1716), who was at Deshima in the early 1690s and
twice traveled to Edo with the Dutch party that visited the shogun’s
court there annually. Kaempfer was a keen student of all aspects of Japan
end Japanese life (as he could observe them), and he later published in
Europe his History of Japan, a book that captured the minds of Europeans
just then awakening to an interest in the Far East. It was used by Montes-
quieu and others in their writings as a primary source for observations on
Japan.

By the early eighteenth century, the desire to learn about the West had
become increasingly widespread among Japanese scholars and even gov-
ernment officials. The great Confucian rationalist and shogunate adviser
Arai Hakuseki, for example, produced a book about conditions in the
West based on interviews with an Italian missionary named Sidotti who,
after studying Japanese in Manila, had made his way alone to Japan in
1708. One reason for this renewal of interest in the West was the diver-
sity in intellectual inquiry encouraged by the other heterodox schools of
scholarship; another was the strong leaning on the part of Tokugawa in-
tellectuals as a whole toward the kind of practical study that Western
learning offered.

The actual start of the Dutch Studies movement was made possible
by the eighth Tokugawa shogun, Yoshimune (1684-1751), who in 1720
was persuaded by his advisers to lift all restrictions on the importation of
foreign books (i.e., Chinese and Dutch books) so long as they did not
deal with the still forbidden subject of Christianity. Yoshimune is noted
for his efforts to reform the shogunate, including the rather futile policy
of reviving the martial spirit of the samurai class. He was also a man who
greatly admired learning and was willing to patronize scholars of all
schools if he thought their ideas might be useful. He listened, for example,
to the views of Ogyu Sorai, even though these were quite at variance with
the orthodox Neo-Confucian attitude toward the state; and he agreed to
allow the pursuit of Western learning and even sponsored the study of
the Dutch language because he hoped they might be of practical value
to the shogunate.

Some information about Western science could be garnered through
translations of Western books into Chinese by Jesuit scholars of the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries in China; but a working knowledge of
Dutch was obviously essential to the new students of Western learning if
they wished to go deeply into their studies. It is a tribute to the great zeal
of the early pioneers of Dutch Studies that they persisted in the painfully
tedious tasks of compiling Dutch-Japanese dictionaries and translating
technical books, at first only a few lines at a time, with only the limited
help they could obtain from the Dutch and their interpreters at Nagasaki.
Nevertheless, by the late eighteenth century, the scholars of Dutch
Studies had produced a respectable body of work, including dictionaries.

Heterodox Trends

221

translations, and treatises on Western subjects. And, in 1811, the shogun-
ate gave further impetus to their movement by opening an office for the
translation of foreign books in Edo.

The overwhelming interest of the early scholars of Dutch Studies in
medical and other scientific matters is attributable not only to the fact
that these subjects were practical and safe (that is, unlikely to be con-
nected directly with Christianity), but also, it appears, to the general tem-
perament of the men drawn to study them. The rangaku scholars were of
a type who had an insatiable curiosity about all manner of things, who
loved to experiment simply for the sake of experimenting and, because of
their instinctively pragmatic approach to life, were not especially attracted
to questions of social or political ideology. Most of the early rangaku
scholars dabbled in many fields, including medicine, botany, astronomy,
and geography. As we shall see, they also practiced painting in the Western
style by employing the techniques of realistic perspective and chiaroscuro;
but their interest in Western ideas and philosophy was conspicuously
slight, even allowing for their wish to avoid the topic of Christianity.

Toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth, however, there appeared a number of scholars of Western
learning who devoted their attention increasingly to questions of military
preparedness, economics, and foreign affairs, and who also advocated
programs of action. Among the reasons for this were the perennial, al-
though ever more pressing, problems of the Tokugawa period: the dis-
equilibrium caused by the growth of commercial markets and a complex
monetary system in a state still theoretically based on a natural economy;
the inability, because of the seclusion policy, to alleviate domestic eco-
nomic difficulties by increasing foreign trade; and continuance of the
samurai as a largely idle class separated from their main source of income,
the soil.

The shogunate attempted to deal with these and other problems by
undertaking a series of great reforms, the first of which was conducted
by the shogun Yoshimune in the second quarter of the eighteenth century.
But apart from some worthwhile programs, such as the encouragement
of land reclamation, diversification of crops, and the adoption of more
equitable and human penal laws, these reforms were largely traditional-
istic and ill-suited to solving difficulties created chiefly by an expanding,
dynamic economy. Shogunate reformers, for example, invariably sought
to resolve the economic suffering in certain sectors of society by calling
upon people everywhere to be more frugal; but, with very few exceptions,
they did not consider the possibility of expanding the national wealth
through an increase in foreign trade.

The apprehensions of Dutch Studies scholars of the late Tokugawa
period were further intensified by the mounting incursion of foreigners,
especially Russians, into the regions surrounding Japan. By the end of

222

Heterodox Trends

the eighteenth century, Russian explorers and traders had pushed east-
ward across the northern reaches of the world and, in addition to estab-
lishing colonies in places such as Kamchatka and the Aleutians, were
making periodic probes into islands closer to Japan, including Hokkaido
(until this time in Japanese history inhabited almost exclusively by the
Ainu) and the Kurils. It is little wonder, therefore, that the Dutch Studies
scholars should turn their eyes northward in assessing the challenges and
opportunities presented by the outside world.

Among the most astute and imaginative of these later scholars of
Dutch Studies was Honda Toshiaki (1744-1 821). 16 Raised in one of the
northern domains of Japan, Toshiaki devoted his life to the study of a
wide range of Western subjects from mathematics and astronomy to mili-
tary science, geography, and navigation. He also traveled widely through-
out Japan, observing the social and economic conditions of different
regions, and even went by ship into the northern seas, perhaps as far as
Kamchatka. Toshiaki believed that Japan not only should seek to increase
its foreign trade but also should expand territorially overseas. It was im-
perative first that Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kurils be colonized to pre-
vent them from falling into the hands of the Russians; then other islands
and territories in Asia and North America could be absorbed to form a
great Japanese empire whose capital, Toshiaki felt, should be situated in
Kamchatka. Toshiaki was particularly fond of likening Japan to England,
the island country of the West that had also founded a far-flung empire.

Toshiaki was perhaps more blatantly imperialistic in his views than
most, but he was certainly not alone among scholars of his age in advo-
cating alteration of the seclusion policy to permit expansion of Japanese
interests abroad. Yet, except for a brief period in the late eighteenth cen-
tury, the opinions of Toshiaki and like-minded men were not especially
appreciated by the shogunate. This was partly because of a clamping
down on heterodox studies undertaken in 1790 by issuance of an edict
calling upon the Confucian schools conducted by the Hayashi family to
teach only the tenets of the orthodox creed of Neo-Confucianism. This
edict was conceived by shogunate officials who sincerely believed that
the diversity of thinking in the country was having adverse effects upon
society and who hoped to strengthen the moral fiber of the Japanese
people by insisting upon propagation once again of an orthodox philo-
sophical line in officially sponsored schools.

In addition to the various heterodox trends we have been examining in
intellectual circles, the middle and late Tokugawa period also witnessed
what may be called heterodox developments in painting, at least insofar as
the main schools flourishing during this time were influenced to a greater
or lesser degree by Western “scientific” techniques of realistic detailing,
shading, and perspective. When one considers that, by the early Meiji

Heterodox Trends

223

period (say, the 1870s), the Japanese had become so enamored of
Western-style painting that they were prepared almost totally to ignore
their own rich artistic heritage, this turning to Western techniques from
about the early eighteenth century on constituted a radical heterodoxy
indeed.

One of the main schools of painting that arose in the eighteenth cen-
tury, although under some Western influence, was in fact inspired by the
so-called literati artists (bunjin) of China (fig. 61). From about the late
Han period on, there had developed in China a distinction between pro-
fessional artists on the one hand and, on the other, amateur artists who
were also members of the ruling literati class and regarded painting as a
natural and proper function of the cultivated man. In its origins, then,
the bunjin distinction was a social one; but, from the fourteenth century
on, a definite bunjin style emerged, distinguished chiefly by the use of
soft colors and a thin and delicate brush stroke, and it was this style that
was finally introduced to Japan in the eighteenth century. Interestingly,
this was the first major school of Chinese painting to be emulated by
the Japanese since painters of the early Muromachi period, some four
centuries earlier, had succumbed to the beauty of Sung monochrome
landscapes.

Unlike their Chinese counterparts, most of the leading Japanese bunjin
artists painted to earn a living. They seem originally to have been in-
spired to adopt this particular style because of the influence of Chinese
bunjin artists who came to Nagasaki in the seventeenth century. The fact
that the fashion for bunjin art thus emerged from Nagasaki, which had
been the center of Portuguese namban culture and in Tokugawa times in-
cluded Dutch as well as Chinese in its foreign community, no doubt helps
explain the Western influences that can be seen in much bunjin work.

The leading Japanese bunjin artists of the eighteenth century were Ike
no Taiga (1723-76) and Yosa Buson (1716-83). Taiga, who was born
into a peasant family in the outskirts of Kyoto, was an extremely preco-
cious child and, at the age of fourteen, began painting fans in order to
support his widowed mother. Although he subsequently became known
as the founder of the bunjin school in Japan, Taiga’s mature painting style
is actually quite eclectic and reveals the influences not only of the Muro-
machi monochrome masters and the Sotatsu-Korin (Rimpa) school but
also of Western art (especially in the techniques of perspective and depth
perception). Like all bunjin artists, Taiga did most of his paintings of Chi-
nese-style landscapes and people. His pictures also often have a delight-
fully eccentric and witty quality that suggests they were done by one of
the more joyous and refreshing personalities of the age.

Taiga’s friend Buson was both a noted painter and a master of haiku.
Like Taiga, he traveled frequently about the country and added much
that was Japanese to his essentially “Chinese” landscapes. Also like Taiga,

Fig. 61 “Buddhist Temple among Cloudy Peaks,”
landscape painting in the literati (nanga) style
(Honolulu Academy of Arts , Gift of London Gallery y
Tokyo, 1975 [6162.1])

Heterodox Trends

225

Buson did thoroughly charming caricature work that was undoubtedly in-
fluenced by the indigenous Japanese tradition of caricature, since Buson
is known to have studied the great twelfth-century Animal Scrolls of the
priest Toba. In the series of drawings he did to illustrate Basho ’s The
Marrow Road of Okuy Buson, as a writer of haiku who also traveled into
the northern provinces, has captured the spirit of this great travel account
so perfectly that, once having seen his illustrations of it, we have diffi-
culty imagining how they could possibly have been done in any other
way. Indeed, Buson’s art might well be called the art of haiku , and some
of his most appealing works are known as ((kaiku pictures” (haiga) — that
is, pictures used to illustrate haiku , the texts of which are usually painted
in calligraphic brush style in the upper right-hand corners.

Some comment on Buson as a poet may help to enhance appreciation
of Buson the artist. In comparing Buson to Basho, a Western critic has
said, “Basho was gentle, wise, loving, and mystic; Buson was brilliant and
many-sided, not mystic in the least, but intensely clever and alive to the
impressions of the world around him. A foreign simile would be to liken
Basho to a pearl, and Buson to a diamond.”17 Two poems will illustrate
both Buson’s cleverness and his sensitivity to impressions of the world
around him:

Spring rain: and as yet
the little ffoglets’ bellies
haven’t got wet.

Departing spring:

with belated cherry blossoms

shilly-shallying.18

Although Taiga and Buson had qualities that were unique and great,
many other bunjin artists were mere Sinophiles, who turned to this style
of painting as part of a greater craving for things Chinese. It is interest-
ing to note that, even at a time when some Japanese were inaugurating a
movement of National Learning with strongly xenophobic and national-
istic overtones, others — scholars as well as painters — were giving all their
love to China. This is a paradox characteristic of the ambivalence with
which the sensitive and highly adaptable Japanese have often confronted
the dominant outside world, represented by China in premodern times
and the West in the modern era.

A second new school of painting to evolve in the eighteenth century
was the realistic or naturalistic school, whose most outstanding practi-
tioner was Maruyama Okyo (1733-95). In this school, the influence of
Western art was very strong and in fact the followers of Okyo were the
forerunners of one of the mainstreams of painting in modern Japan.
Okyo did many sketches and drawings from nature that are extremely
detailed and realistic, but his most interesting works are his larger paint-

226

Heterodox Trends

ings in which he sought to blend traditional Far Eastern and Western
artistic styles.

In contrast to the synthesizing efforts of Okyo and others of the natu-
ralistic school, the Dutch Studies painters openly attempted to imitate
Western models. The best-known, although perhaps also the most ex-
treme, representative of these painters was Shiba Kokan (1738-1818).
Kokan did not actually study the Dutch language; but, in his diversity of
interests and his love of Western scientific and utilitarian methods, he
was very much the rangaku man. The paintings of Kokan, who was the
first Japanese to produce a copper engraving, are technically excellent
and are definitive proof that long before the Meiji Restoration the Japa-
nese had become thoroughly familiar with the mechanics of Western art.
Kokan’s work is apt to impress one more for its technique than its inspi-
ration, but there is no denying the great contribution he made to this
area of Western learning.

The influence of Western techniques of painting was also felt by the
later ukiyo-e school of artists. Certain devices, such as realistic perspec-
tive, had been employed on occasion by ukiyo-e artists from about the
early 1700s, but it was not until the great nineteenth-century painters
Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) and Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)
that the Western influence became pronounced.

Hokusai was a phenomenon even in the prolific world of Tokugawa
ukiyo-e art. Virtually unknown until he was about forty, Hokusai (who
later styled himself “the old man mad with painting”) absorbed the main
features of all the major art styles, native and foreign, then known in
Japan and produced literally tens of thousands of drawings and paintings
of a great variety of subjects over an incredibly active career that contin-
ued until his death, in 1849, at the age of eighty-nine. Hokusai is best
remembered for his landscape prints, especially his “Thirty-six Views of
Mount Fuji.” Curiously, Fuji, Japan’s greatest natural treasure and the
object of countless lyrical flights by Japanese poets, had until this time
received very little attention from Japanese painters. Possibly this was be-
cause Fuji’s wonderful symmetry simply was not in keeping with the gen-
erally angular, jagged conception of mountains and rock formations in the
highly influential Chinese tradition of monochrome landscape work. Sig-
nificantly, the Western-oriented Shiba Kokan was also attracted to Fuji
and sought to apply scientific techniques to produce a truly realistic paint-
ing of the mountain. Hokusai’s views of Fuji, on the other hand, are often
startlingly conceived, as for example the world-famous glimpse of its
snow-capped cone through a huge, curling wave (fig. 62).

Whereas Maruyama Okyo self-consciously tried to merge Far Eastern
and Western art and Shiba Kokan imitated Western painting outright,
Hokusai, with his boundless energy and enthusiasm, simply absorbed the
techniques of Western as well as other art styles and used them to shape

Heterodox Trends

221

Fig. 62 “The Great Wave at Kanagawa” by Hokusai (The Metropolitan Museum
of Arty Howard Mansfield Collection , Rogers Fund, 1936)

his own unique style. Hokusai’s better landscapes display a superb sense
of design and proportion and a compassionately human concern for the
figures, often from the lower classes, who inhabit them. Hokusai has en-
joyed great favor in the West, and some of his prints, along with those of
Hiroshige, have become as well known to Western art lovers as the more
famous masterpieces of their own tradition. The case of Hokusai is an
excellent illustration of cross-cultural exchange, for here was a Japanese
artist who borrowed from the West and at the same time contributed,
along with the ukiyo-e school in general, a new and exotic inspiration to
the French Impressionists and other Western artists of the late nineteenth
century.

Hiroshige, although he painted other subjects, was much more of a
specialist in landscapes than the extraordinarily dynamic and versatile
Hokusai. In a Hokusai landscape, attention is often divided between the
setting and the people in it; but in Hiroshige’s work, everything is subor-
dinated to the setting and especially to the mood established by season,
weather, time of day, and angle of view. Moreover, wdiile Hokusai’s fig-
ures, as they go about their business, frequently provide an element of
genre interest to his landscapes, Hiroshige’s are usually mere reminders of
the insignificance of man against the vastness of nature (figs. 63-64). In
this, Hiroshige would appear to be an inheritor of the spirit of the Chi-
nese and Japanese masters of monochrome landscapes; and even though

Fig. 63 “Cutting a Log” from “The 100 Poems Explained by the Nurse” by
Hokusai (courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum)

Fig. 64 “Evening Rain at Azuma no Mori” by Hiroshige ( courtesy of the Brook-
lyn Museum)

Heterodox Trends

229

Hiroshige depicts far more dramatic seasonal and weather changes in his
prints, there is an underlying tranquility to them that is also very remi-
niscent of the earlier monochrome work.

Hiroshige achieved his greatest fame in a series of prints entitled
“The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido,” depicting scenes along the
great highway connecting Kyoto and Edo. By far the most important
thoroughfare in Japanese history, the Tokaido during Tokugawa times
was the scene not only of many great daimyo processions to and from the
military capital but also of the coming and going of an unending stream
of other people, including merchants, itinerant priests, pilgrims, enter-
tainers, adventurers, and even the Dutch on their journeys to the sho-
gun’s court. In response to this bustling traffic, the stations of the
Tokaido flourished and each accumulated stories and legends about the
famous people who had visited its inns, restaurants, brothels, and bath-
houses, and about the unusual events it had witnessed. Hence, the
Tokaido became a fertile source for both writers and artists. Hokusai,
among the artists, tried his hand at a series of prints of the Tokaido sta-
tions, but no painter succeeded in immortalizing the highway and its
famous stopping-off places like Hiroshige. To many people around the
world who have seen copies of them, these Tokaido prints by Hiroshige
constitute their most vivid impressions of Japan. And, in truth, they
remain even to those long familiar with the country a constant source of
delight as extraordinarily effective representations in art of the peculiar
qualities of Japan’s natural beauties and seasonal moods.

A significant development of the late Tokugawa period was the deci-
sive shift in the center of cultural activity from the Osaka-Kyoto region
to Edo. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Kansai
had produced such leading figures of the world of art as Sotatsu, Korin,
Saikaku, and Chikamatsu. With the exception of Basho, who moved to
Edo, and the painters of the early ukiyo-e school, the most outstanding
creative artists up through the Genroku epoch were the products of
Japan’s ancient center of cultural life. But by the Bunka-Bunsei epoch
(the end of the eighteenth century and the first quarter or so of the nine-
teenth), Edo had taken over this central role in culture. It had become
the principal home for writers, artists, and intellectuals, as well as the
mecca for publishing and scholarship. The cultural primacy of Edo
established at this time proved lasting, and indeed has been even more
completely asserted in the modern era.

The Bunka-Bunsei epoch was a relatively placid time preceding the
final, crisis decades of the Tokugawa period, when the Western powers
exerted increasing pressure upon and finally succeeded in forcing Japan
to open its doors and enter the modern world. In painting, the epoch
was of course distinguished by men such as Shiba Kokan, Sharaku,

230

Heterodox Trends

Utamaro, Hokusai, and Hiroshige. But in literature there was no such
comparable brilliance. The efforts of late Tokugawa authors were, in
fact, polarized rather sharply into the writing either of “witty” and
“amorous” books (kokkeibon and sharebon) or of historical novels (yomi-
hon ). The distinction between the two categories was essentially one of
the overly frothy versus the overly serious, of the pornographic versus
the didactic.

Literature dealing with the floating world of the Tokugawa pleasure
quarters had reached an early level of excellence in the writing of Sai-
kaku. But the subject matter was too narrow in range to be a continuing
source for true artistic inspiration and, with few exceptions, the succes-
sors to Saikaku produced distinctly inferior work. The examples of this
sort of work in the Bunka-Bunsei epoch are interesting as social commen-
taries on contemporary styles and tastes, and particularly on the meaning
of two much-admired qualities of people of fashion in Edo, sui and tsu ,
which Sansom has aptly rendered as chic and savoir faire. Otherwise, the
literature of the floating world as observed in its later variants, including
the witty and amorous books, was merely a cheap, salacious type of writ-
ing that catered to low and vulgar tastes.

The most commercially successful author of this lighter type of litera-
ture in the early nineteenth century was Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831),
who began his career as the writer of puppet plays in Osaka before he
moved to Edo and turned his attention to prose literature. Ikku’s most
popular work, the picaresque Hizakurige (A Journey by Foot), recounts
the adventures of two ribald and devil-may-care rogues as they make
their way down the Tokaido from Edo. In contrast to the sophisticated
inquiries of Saikaku 's writings, Hizakurige, with its slapstick and its
bawdy humor, portrays the world of lusty adventure and the irresistible
pleasures of the flesh.

The second major category of literature in the Bunka-Bunsei epoch
was the historical novel, whose most noted author was Takizawa Bakin
(1767-1848). Like Ikku, but unlike many writers of the epoch, Bakin
was able to earn his living solely by his literary efforts. His magnum opus,
written over a period of some twenty-eight years and intended to be the
longest novel in either Chinese or Japanese, was entitled Satomi and the
Eight Dogs (Nansd Satomi Hakkenden). It is the tale of eight men who
vow to restore the fortunes of the warrior family of Satomi in the fifteenth
century. Against this heroic, medieval background, Bakin set about dem-
onstrating how such ethical values as filial piety, loyalty, chastity, and
selflessness actually function in the lives of men. Bakin’s didacticism is
all-encompassing, and each episode in Satomi and the Eight Dogs is de-
signed to show how, inevitably, “virtue is rewarded and vice is punished”
(kanzen choaku). Compared to the literature of the floating world that
was predominant through much of the Tokugawa period, this was indeed

Heterodox Trends

231

sober writing. But Bakin’s great popular reception suggests that the
temper of the times was turning more serious, at least in some circles;
and many people were prepared and perhaps even anxious to rekindle
Confucian traditions and some of the spirit of the more admirable
behavior of the samurai.

Before we leave the subject of heterodoxy during the Tokugawa period,
a few words should be said about how heterodoxy spread even into the
world of tea. The “orthodoxy” of tea was, of course, the tea ceremony
itself, chanoyUy which had evolved during the medieval age and which
enjoyed great prosperity during Tokugawa times as one of the elegant
pastimes (yugei) discussed in the last chapter. Chanoyuy as we have seen,
is based on the use of powdered tea and is a ritually elaborate procedure
whose principal spiritual basis is Zen Buddhism. By the eighteenth cen-
tury there had emerged a movement, supported especially by literati
(bunjin) artists, that opposed chanoyu and its powdered tea and advo-
cated, instead, the drinking of sencha or steeped tea.

The bunjin artists were attracted to sencha in part because of its asso-
ciation with the literati lifestyle in China, which included the drinking of
steeped tea. But these artists, as well as others, also embraced sencha as
a protest against chanoyu , which they viewed as both excessively com-
plex and increasingly debased by virtue of the commercial purveyance of
it as an elegant pastime. Sencha was a beverage, uncluttered by rules, that
could be freely consumed by people coming together in casual social
gatherings.

The growing popularity of sencha in the second half of the Tokugawa
period also benefited from the intellectual trend of the times to look to
the past to revive earlier traditions or derive inspiration from them. We
have observed this trend, for example, in the School of Ancient Studies
of Confucianism and the Neo-Shintoist School of National Learning.
Sencha advocates rejected powdered tea, a product of the Sung period of
Chinese history, and called for a return to the “original way of tea” as it
was formulated during the earlier T’ang dynasty, especially in the classic
eighth-century writing by Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea (Cha Ching).]q

As the nineteenth century began, incursions by Westerners increased.
Not only Russian, but also British and American ships began appearing
in Japanese waters. In 1808, for example, the British ship Phaeton , on
patrol during the Napoleonic wars, entered Nagasaki harbor looking for
some Dutch merchants. The Japanese magistrate of Nagasaki ordered
the ship to depart, and even began preparations to attack it. But the anti-
quated weapons of the Japanese could only have mounted a puny offense
against the Phaeton , which was armed with fifty cannon, and the attack
was delayed. Meanwhile, after a few days, the Phaetony having seized

232

Heterodox Trends

and interrogated the Dutch merchants and having demanded and re-
ceived supplies from the Japanese, departed. It was a brief incident, but
it greatly shocked the shogunate and contributed to the mounting xeno-
phobia among shogunate officials and others.

We observed at the beginning of the last chapter that the seclusion
policy implemented by the shogunate in the seventeenth century, al-
though it greatly reduced Japan’s foreign contacts, was not intended, so
far as we can judge, to make Japan a permanently “closed country.” But
shogunate leaders at the end of the eighteenth century and the begin-
ning of the nineteenth, faced with a new and potentially very dangerous
threat from abroad, chose to regard seclusion as the fixed law of the
Tokugawa state, even calling Japan sakoku (literally, “chained country”),
a term first used in 1801. 20 To enforce sakoku , the shogunate in 1825
went so far as to declare a policy of “Don’t Think Twice” (ninen naku)
toward unwanted foreigners. If foreigners (meaning Westerners other
than the Dutch) should enter Japanese waters or land on Japanese soil,
they were to be driven away forthwith.

In that same year, 1825, a scholar of the Mito school, Aizawa Seishi-
sai (1781-1863), published a book, entitled New Proposals (Shimon),
that became one of the most influential political writings of its time. The
Mito school, as noted earlier in this chapter, had been established by the
Mito han in the seventeenth century to undertake the research for and
writing of The History of Great Japan, a lengthy chronicle of Japan cover-
ing the period from 660 b.c. to 1392 that focused on the imperial suc-
cession. Called the “later Mito scholars” to distinguish them from the
early Mito scholars who first undertook work on The History of Great
Japan , Seishisai and his contemporaries of the Mito school concocted a
potent ideology, articulated in New Proposals , that they advanced to deal
with the foreign threat that then confronted Japan. The basis of this ide-
ology, which was much influenced by the School of National Learning,
was belief in Japan as a sacred, divine land. Rejecting the view of Japa-
nese Sinophiles that China was the great Middle Kingdom of the world,
the later Mito scholars — like Yamaga Soko and some others earlier in the
Tokugawa period — claimed that status for Japan. But these scholars went
far beyond Soko and the others to claim both a geographical and cul-
tural superiority for Japan that made it the veritable beacon and light of
the world. In the words of Aizawa Seishisai in New Proposals :

Our divine Land is where the sun rises and where the primordial energy orig-
inates. The heirs of the Great Sun have occupied the Imperial Throne from
generation to generation without change from time immemorial. Japan’s posi-
tion at the vertex of the earth makes it the standard for the nations of the
world. Indeed, it casts its light over the world, and the distance which the
resplendent imperial influence reaches knows no limit. Today, the alien bar-
barians of the West, the lowly organs of the legs and feet of the world, are

Heterodox Trends

233

dashing about across the seas, trampling other countries underfoot, and
daring, with their squinting eyes and limping feet, to override the noble
nations. What manner of arrogance is this!21

The later Mito scholars, in addition to advocating a policy of forcibly
expelling the Western barbarians (joi) , also called upon Japanese every-
where to recognize Japan’s sacred character as a nation and, above all, to
revere its godlike emperor. Here we see the stirring up of a spirit of
extreme reverence for the emperor that was to inspire the imperial loyal-
ists who finally overthrew the Tokugawa shogunate later in the century
and that was received as an article of faith by the architects of a modern
Japan.

Although reverence for the emperor (sound) became a loyalist rallying
cry against the Tokugawa in the 1850s and 1860s, it was not so used by
Aizawa Seishisai and the later Mito scholars of the 1820s. Seishisai, for
one, was firmly committed to the Tokugawa state in its existing struc-
ture. In calling for reverence for the emperor, he wished to infuse a
sense of nationalism in the Japanese people. The first step in doing this
was to clarify for the people that Japan was a hierarchically structured
state whose head was the emperor but whose actual affairs were handled
by the Tokugawa shogunate.

Seishisai did not think that the West posed a serious military threat to
Japan; and in fact at the time it did not, since the Industrial Revolution
had not yet quite reached the point where Western power could threaten
countries big and small everywhere in the world. Rather, Seishisai be-
lieved that Western strength lay primarily in Christianity, which he re-
garded as a pernicious religion that could subvert Japan from within.
Only by promoting its own nationalism, which Seishisai associated with
the term kokutai (usually translated in modern times as “national polity,”
but meaning here “unity of religion and government”),22 could Japan
defend itself internally against Christianity even as it sought, externally,
to drive the Westerners away by force.

Mito thought, as found in Aizawa Seishisai ’s New Proposals , was thus
virulently anti-Western, resonating well with the hard-line, joi approach
of the shogunate to Western contacts that was reflected in its “Don’t
Think Twice” policy of 1825. But this was not a policy that the shogun-
ate, in a time of rapidly moving events that included England’s defeat of
China in the Opium War of 1839-42, would seek to maintain indefi-
nitely, and in 1842 it was abandoned. The Western countries were too
insistent; and, out of the milieu of divergent opinions about how Japan
should deal with them, an increasing number of voices — many of them
those of Dutch Studies scholars — spoke of the need for some kind of
accommodation with the West, which would probably mean modifying,
at least to some extent, the sakoku policy.

234

Heterodox Trends

Although Japan’s “response to the West” in these decades may often
have seemed confused and inconsistent, it emerged from a powerful dy-
namic: to a far greater degree than other non- Western people, the Japa-
nese were both impressed and alarmed by the material superiority of the
West. We see this perhaps most clearly in the proclamation of certain
scholars in the very last years of the Tokugawa shogunate of the need for
a combination of “Eastern morals and Western technology,” which apho-
ristically suggested the central problem that was later to confront a mod-
ernizing Japan: how to retain the socially binding ethics of traditional
behavior while at the same time resolutely acquiring the material bene-
fits of the Western scientific and industrial revolutions.

Encounter with the West

In 1844 King William II of Holland dispatched a letter to the shogun
of Japan warning him that the quickening pace of world events made con-
tinuance of the Japanese policy of national seclusion both unwise and
untenable. The development of steam navigation, for one thing, now en-
abled the ships of Western countries readily to penetrate the most distant
waters of the world. China, as noted, had already suffered military defeat
at the hands of the British in the Opium War, and Japan could not expect
to remain aloof from world affairs much longer.

Although they debated it among themselves, Tokugawa officials did
nothing concrete in response to the letter of the Dutch king. The shogun-
ate was at the time engrossed in the last of its great traditionalistic
reforms, and the failure of this reform, combined with vacillation in the
face of the now pressing need to seriously reconsider the seclusion policy,
portended trouble for the shogunate. The Edo regime was certainly under
no immediate threat in the 1 840s of being overthrown, but the political
temperature in regard to seclusion was rising and could readily become
a challenge of a kind that, in gravity, the shogunate had not faced before.

This challenge became reality with the arrival in Edo Bay in the
summer of 1853 of Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States
and his squadron of “black ships.” Perry had been dispatched by Presi-
dent Millard Fillmore to inquire into the possibility of opening diplo-
matic and commercial relations with Japan, and in 1854 he achieved the
first objective through the signing of a Treaty of Friendship that provided
for an exchange of consular officials between Japan and the United States.

The first American consul, Townsend Harris, arrived in Japan in 1856,
and it was he who finally secured a commercial pact. This pact, in addi-
tion to providing for the opening of certain Japanese ports to trade, con-
tained a set of stipulations, previously worked out by the Western powers
in their dealings with China, that became known as “the unequal treaty
provisions.” These included the principle of extraterritoriality, or the right
of the Western signatory to try its nationals by its own laws for offenses
committed on Japanese soil; the most-favored-nation clause, which pro-
vided that any additional treaty benefit acquired by one Western nation

236

Encounter with the West

would automatically accrue to all other nations holding similar treaties;
and the setting of a fixed customs levy of approximately 5 percent on all
goods imported to Japan, a levy that could be altered only with the con-
sent of both parties to a treaty. It was on the basis of the Harris agree-
ment, and especially its most-favored-nation clause, that the principal
European powers also acquired commercial treaties with Japan during the
next few months.

The coming of Perry and Harris brought to an end Japan's seclusion
policy of more than two hundred years, but it did not resolve differences
of opinion about the policy. There was the question, for example, of the
extent to which Japan should be opened. The Harris treaty specified
only that a few ports be made available to foreign trade over a period of
years. Should the rest of Japan, even the interior, also be opened to for-
eign merchants, missionaries, and residents, and if so over what span of
time? Some diehards continued to insist that the treaties with the Western
“barbarians” be regarded simply as tactical measures valid only until
Japan could strengthen itself sufficiently to drive the foreigners once again
from the divine land; but other Japanese began to consider more soberly
the sweeping and long-term implications of their new relations with the
West.

The final, chaotic years of the Tokugawa period are fascinating for the
momentous political events that led to the overthrow of the shogunate,
but they are not especially important to Japanese cultural history and
hence may be briefly summarized here. The first wave of opposition to
the shogunate’s handling of foreign affairs came primarily from certain of
the larger tozama or outside han of western Japan, especially Satsuma and
Choshu. These great domains regarded as anachronistic the Tokugawa
governing system whereby they were theoretically excluded from all par-
ticipation in the conduct of national affairs at Edo. In the early 1860s, the
shogunate sought a reconciliation by bringing some of the more impor-
tant outside daimyos into its deliberative councils. At the same time, it
attempted to strengthen relations with Kyoto by arranging a marriage
between the shogun and an imperial princess.

With these developments, the initiative in opposition to the shogun-
ate’s policies was assumed by younger, activist samurai from Satsuma,
Choshu, and other domains, many of whom renounced their feudal ties
to become ronin and thus free to pursue their own political convictions.
These samurai, also known as shishi or “men of high purpose,” formed
the nucleus of the loyalist movement that grew in intensity during the
next few years. By the middle of the decade, the loyalists were openly
calling for the overthrow of the shogunate on the grounds that, not only
had it usurped the rightful ruling powers of the emperor, it had failed
militarily to protect Japan against the intrusion of the Western barbarians.
For them, “Revere the Emperor!” became a call for imperial restoration

Encounter with the West

237

and “Expel the Barbarians!” a demand that the shogunate do what in fact
was no longer possible: drive the foreigners from Japanese soil.

The climax to the confrontation between the shogunate and the loyal-
ists, more and more of whom were congregating in Kyoto where they
aligned themselves with anti-Tokugawa ministers at the imperial court,
came in 1 866 when the shogunate attempted for the second time in two
years to put down the loyalist faction in the most unruly of the domains,
Choshu. At this critical point, Satsuma, whose loyalists had already
formed a secret alliance with Choshu, refused to join the shogunate’s
expedition, and in the ensuing conflict the shogunate forces were de-
feated. Encouraged by this demonstration of military weakness on the
part of the shogunate, Satsuma and Choshu loyalists, joined by men
from other domains, carried out a coup in Kyoto at the end of the year
and proclaimed an imperial restoration. The shogun, realizing the futility
of further resistance, capitulated; and, although there was some scattered
fighting by stubborn supporters of the shogunate, the restoration was
completed by early 1867 with very little loss of blood.

The Meiji Restoration, named after the Emperor Meiji (1852-1912)
who ascended the throne in 1867 at the age of fifteen, was a political
revolution from above carried out by younger, enlightened members of
Japan’s ruling samurai class.1 These men and their supporters had called
for a “return to antiquity” (fukko), and, in the early days following the
Restoration, there was a certain heady excitement about recapturing the
spirit and ways of the past, especially through temporary reinstatement
of the ancient institutions of imperial government as originally set forth
in the eighth-century Taiho Code. But the new Meiji leaders, who in-
cluded some Kyoto courtiers along with samurai, were men of the future,
not the past. They made this clear from the very outset of the Meiji
period by quietly dropping the cry of “Expel the Barbarians!” which they
had so recently used to embarrass the Tokugawa shogunate. They may
have continued to harbor personal animosities toward the West, particu-
larly for forcing Japan to accede to the unequal treaties; but the Meiji
leaders were by and large pragmatic men who respected the material
superiority of the West and wished to emulate it by undertaking mod-
ernization. Sharing an overriding concern for Japanese territorial inde-
pendence, they believed that, quite apart from the obvious benefits and
enjoyments it would bring, modernization was essential if Japan was to
be protected against possible future threats from the outside. Accord-
ingly, they adopted as a general statement of their policy the slogan, taken
from Chinese legalist thought, of “Enrich the country and strengthen its
arms” (fukoku-kyohei). Japan was to be enriched through moderniza-
tion for the primary purpose of strengthening it militarily.

The devotion of the Meiji leaders to modernization can also be seen in
the brief, five-article Charter Oath they issued in 1868 in the emperor’s

238

Encounter with the West

name. This may be regarded as a very broad statement of purpose by
the new regime, and it is significant that at least two of its articles seem
to be explicit commitments to modernization:

Article 4. Evil customs of the past shall be broken off and everything
based upon the just laws of Nature.

Article 5. Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to
strengthen the foundations of imperial rule.2

In line with their determination to make Japan a modern state, the
Meiji leaders took a series of steps during their first decade in power that
together constituted a radical and sweeping reform of Japanese society.
These included abolition of the feudal han and the institution of a cen-
trally controlled system of prefectural government; and dis olution of the
samurai class and the establishment of basic legal equalities for all people.
One of the most severe blows to the old, rigid class system, and particu-
larly to the inflated samurai sense of superiority, was the adoption in 1873
of universal military conscription.

Despite the inevitable stresses caused by social change and the specific
grievances of many samurai as they were dispossessed of their traditional
privileges, the Japanese by the early 1870s had in general abandoned
their dreams of restoring the past and were caught up in an overwhelming
urge to join the march of Western progress. This was the beginning of a
period of nearly two decades during which the Japanese unabashedly
pursued the fruits of Western “civilization and enlightenment” (bummei-
kaika). That the government intended to take the lead in this quest for
the holy grail of foreign culture can be seen in the dispatch in 1871 of a
mission to visit the United States and Europe headed by a distinguished
court noble, Iwakura Tomomi (1825-83), and including a number of
other leaders of the new Meiji regime. So cherished was the opportunity
to journey to the West at this time that one young boy who accompanied
the Iwakura Mission in order to study in the United States wrote (years
later) that he and his fellow students all fervently believed that one could
not become a real human being without going abroad.

Actually, missions abroad to the West were by this time nothing new.
The Tokugawa shogunate had send one to the United States in 1860,
just two years after ratification of the Harris treaty with Japan. Thereafter,
until its overthrow in 1868, the shogunate dispatched missions yearly to
both the United States and Europe. In total, more than three hundred
Japanese visited the West during the last eight years of Tokugawa rule.3

The remarkable thing about the Iwakura Mission was the presence on
it of so many ranking officials, who obviously felt that visiting the West
at this time warranted their leaving Japan only three years after the con-
vulsion that gave birth to the Meiji government. Scheduled to remain
away a year, the mission did not return for nearly two. During that time

Encounter with the West

239

its hundred or so members, often dividing themselves into smaller groups,
visited the United States, England and Scotland, France, Belgium, Hol-
land, Germany, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, and Switzer-
land. The mission had hoped also to visit the Iberian countries of Spain
and Portugal, but were prevented by civil war in the former.4

The stated aim of the Iwakura Mission was to secure revision of the
unequal treaties, but very likely the leaders knew from the beginning
that revision was impossible until Japan became stronger and, from a
Western perspective, more “civilized.” Hence the real purpose of the
mission’s leaders was to see the West firsthand, learn about its progress
and modernization, and set Japan on the course to becoming a modern,
progressive nation. Thanks to an official diary of some two thousand
pages that was compiled from the mission, we know a good deal about
the thinking and impressions of its members during their lengthy travels.
In reading the diary we are struck not only with the members’ fascina-
tion with that great nineteenth-century utopian dream of progress, but
also with their discernment in evaluating the various Western countries in
terms of their particular strengths (and weaknesses) and their shrewd
judgment about how they could borrow selectively from one Western
country or another.

The members of the Iwakura Mission clearly perceived that the West-
ern countries had achieved modernization not through mutual coopera-
tion but through a constant struggle for wealth and power that entailed
fierce and sometimes violent national rivalries. Of all the ideologies that
accompanied the scientific and industrial revolutions and the West’s rush
into modernity, none exceeded the force of nationalism, and the Iwakura
Mission’s leaders did not for a moment hesitate to conceive and plan for
their own modernization in terms, first and foremost, of Japan’s national
interests. They understood that, in the age of progress, Japan had to join
in its advance quickly and vigorously, lest it be left in the West’s historical
dust.

Travel to the West became the surest means for advancement among
Japanese in the early Meiji period. Of the many youths who went to study
in Europe and the United States, the great majority were sponsored by
the government as part of its civilization and enlightenment policy. Upon
returning home, these youths had virtually unlimited career opportuni-
ties. Meanwhile, for those who could not make the trip abroad, the gov-
ernment and other institutions invited a number of foreigners to Japan
as teachers and technical advisers. Offering high wages, they were able to
attract generally excellent people, who provided knowledge and expertise
crucial to the modernization process.

Outward signs of modernity began to appear throughout the country,
but particularly in the metropolitan centers like Tokyo and Yokohama:
steamships, railroads, telegraph lines, a national postal service, industrial

240

Encounter with the West

factories, and, especially exciting to the Japanese, gas-burning streetlamps
that "made the night as bright as the day.” Most of these innovations
were, of course, indispensable to modernization; but many others were
just marginally important or were even ludicrous fads reflecting the craze
among some people to “become Western.”

Western-style uniforms were first adopted by the Japanese military
before the Restoration and were made standard for policemen, train con-
ductors, and other civil functionaries within a few years after the begin-
ning of the modern era.5 During the 1870s, Western clothes, deemed
more practical and up-to-date, were increasingly worn by men in the
cities, often combined amusingly with items of the native costume. Thus,
it was not unusual to see men sporting kimonos over long pants or suit
jackets and hakama skirts. Women and people in the rural areas, on the
other hand, were much slower in adopting the sartorial ways of the West.
Western shoes, moreover, presented a special problem, for the Japanese
foot, splayed from the traditional wearing of sandals, frequently could not
be fitted into footgear imported from abroad.

But whereas the shift to Western wearing attire was made erratically,
and never completely, the transition to the Western custom of cropped
hair for men became something of a national issue. The Japanese are
extraordinarily sensitive to ridicule by others. No doubt this sensitivity
has been heightened by the minimal contact they have had with foreigners
through much of their history. In the early Meiji period, as they sought
to “catch up with the West,” they also faced the practical problem (al-
ready noted in the discussion of the Iwakura Mission) that, so long as
the Western nations regarded their ways as barbaric, it would be that
much more difficult to secure revision of the unequal treaties and achieve
complete independence. Hence, the Japanese government either banned
or tried to restrict practices, such as public bathing, tattooing, and the
sale of pornography, that they thought the foreigners found offensive.
And the wearing of the topknot, which had been the practice of Japanese
men for centuries, also came to be looked upon as primitive and unbe-
coming to the citizens of a modern Japan.

Again, it was the Japanese military who first cut their topknots in order
to wear the hats of their Western-style uniforms. By the early Meiji
period, all prominent Japanese men, including the emperor, wore their
hair cropped (and often grew fine beards and mustaches, like their
Western counterparts): indeed, it was very much the sign of the progres-
sive man to wear his hair this way, and a popular jingle claimed: “If you
tap a cropped head, it will play the tune of civilization and enlighten-
ment.”6 But the fashion was not immediately accepted by the lower
classes, and the Japanese government felt constrained to issue occasional
directives urging its adoption. Some headmen in rural villages are said to
have walked around reading the directives while still sporting their own

Encounter with the West

241

topknots; others cut the topknots but let their “hair of regret” hang down
their backs. Not until about 1890 did the wearing of cropped hair by
men become universal in Japan.

Among the many Western fads, none was more conspicuous or sym-
bolic of the humorous side of foreign borrowing than the eating of beef.
Owing to Buddhist taboos and a scarcity of game animals, the Japanese
had traditionally abstained from eating red meat. With the coming of
foreigners, however, restaurants specializing in beef dishes, especially gyu -
nahe or beef stew, began to crop up in the cities. A contemporary author
of “witty books,” Kanagaki Robun (1829-94), even wrote a collection of
satirical sketches entitled Aguranabe ( Eating Stew Cross-Legged) about the
conversations of customers in a beefhouse who concluded that a man
could not be regarded as civilized unless he ate beef. Kanagaki’s descrip-
tion of one customer includes the observation that

he uses that scent called Eau de Cologne to give sheen to his hair. He wears a
padded silken kimono beneath which a calico undergarment is visible. By his
side is his Western-style umbrella, covered in gingham. From time to time he
removes from his sleeve with a painfully contrived gesture a cheap watch, and
consults the time.7

Meanwhile, this newly enlightened man commented to his neighbor
that “we really should be grateful that even people like ourselves can
now eat beef, thanks to the fact that Japan is steadily becoming a truly
civilized country.” Perhaps it was in celebration of the glory of beef that
about this time some students invented sukiyaki, now one of the hall-
marks of Japanese cuisine to many foreigners.

In 1872 the Meiji government switched to the Western-style solar cal-
endar from Japan’s traditional lunar calendar, which had been inherited
from China many centuries earlier. About the same time, the government
also adopted the practice of Sunday as a weekly day of rest and, perhaps
most intriguing as an example of the infatuation with Western customs,
made Christmas one of its national holidays. Even today Japan, a country
with only a small Christian population, celebrates Christmas with consid-
erable enthusiasm.8

Some of the more fervent advocates of bummei-kaika at the height of
the Western fever in early Meiji times even went so far as to suggest that
Japan should adopt English as its national language. But the most extreme
suggestion was that, since Caucasians were observably superior to the
people of all other races, the Japanese should intermarry with them as
quickly as possible in order to acquire their higher ethnic qualities.

One of the most ultimately profound changes wrought by moderniza-
tion in Japan was the gradual adoption of Western building materials and
architectural styles. Throughout their history, the Japanese had con-
structed their dwellings and other buildings almost entirely out of wood.

242

Encounter with the West

With the growth in recent centuries of great urban centers like Edo and
Osaka, this type of construction gave rise to the constant danger — and all
too frequent occurrence — of fires that consumed large portions of cities.
For example, a devastating fire in 1657 made necessary the extensive
rebuilding of Edo. In 1874, after a fire that gutted the Ginza area of cen-
tral Tokyo, the government took the opportunity to order the construc-
tion of a row of some three hundred two-story brick buildings for the
use of merchants on this bustling thoroughfare. Contemporary wood-
block prints show how grand and exotic these buildings appeared to the
Japanese of that day. The government hoped that the Ginza would serve
as a model to encourage others to build these new fireproofed buildings;
and the newspapers declared that people who walked down the Ginza
could enjoy the enchanted feeling of being in a foreign country.9

Although more and more public and commercial buildings on Western
lines were built in the cities, the construction of Western private homes
was undertaken much more slowly. The higher cost of such homes was
one reason; another was the continuing, overwhelming preference of the
Japanese for their traditional, native-style homes. This was one area in
which Westernization made little headway in Japan, and even today many
Japanese continue to live, as they have for centuries, in houses consisting
chiefly of sparsely furnished rooms with matted floors upon which to sit
and sleep.

In intellectual circles, the great national quest for civilization and en-
lightenment in early Meiji gave rise to a number of study and discussion
groups devoted to the question of transforming Japan into a modern
state. Of these, the most influential was the Meirokusha or uMeiji Six
Society” founded in the sixth year of Meiji, 1873, by some ten of the
more prominent Westernizers of the day. The members of the Meiro-
kusha met twice a month to discuss such subjects as politics, the econ-
omy, education, religion, the Japanese language, and women’s rights. In
1874 they began publication of the Meiji Six Magazine for the purpose
of publishing articles on their views. A large percentage of the Meiro-
kusha membership comprised men who had engaged in Western learning
before the Restoration and had been employed as translators and teachers
by the Tokugawa shogunate in its Office for Barbarian Studies, estab-
lished in 1855 after the arrival of Perry. Hence, the Meirokusha had as
its legacy the venerable tradition of Dutch Studies begun nearly a cen-
tury and a half earlier in Japan.

The leading figure in the Meirokusha, and indeed the most popular
and widely read intellectual of the Meiji period, was Fukuzawa Yukichi
(1835-1901). Fukuzawa was a low-ranking, but personally ambitious and
opportunistic, samurai who began the study of Western gunnery and the
Dutch language as a youth under the patronage of his feudal domain.
Later, when Fukuzawa visited Yokohama shortly after the signing of the

Encounter with the West

243

Harris treaty in 1858 and observed the newly arrived foreigners at first
hand, he learned a sad fact that was to cause anguish for all students of
Dutch Studies: Dutch was practically useless as a medium for dealing
with most Westerners. Fukuzawa, we are told, switched the very next day
to the study of English; and, two years later, in 1860, he was selected to
accompany the Tokugawa shogunate’s first mission to the United States
in what was also the first transoceanic voyage of a Japanese-manned ship.

Fukuzawa made two other trips abroad, in 1861 and 1867. In be-
tween he published Conditions in the Western World (Seiyd Jijo), a book
that established him as one of the foremost interpreters of the West.
Fukuzawa was more of a popularizer than a pure intellectual, and as
such he made a far greater impact on the people of his time. It is no
exaggeration to say that he, more than any other single individual, influ-
enced the minds of a generation of Japanese in the early, formative years
of the modern era. His most successful book, An Encouragement of Learn -
ing (Gakamon no Susume), written between 1872 and 1876, eventually
sold nearly 3.5 million copies. The opening paragraph sets the tone for
Fukuzawa’s argument:

It is said that heaven does not create one man above or below another man.
This means that when men are born from heaven they all are equal. There is
no innate distinction between high and low. It means that men can freely and
independently use the myriad things of the world to satisfy their daily needs
through the labors of their own bodies and minds, and that, as long as they
do not infringe upon the rights of others, may pass their days in happiness.
Nevertheless, as we broadly survey the human scene, there are the wise and
the stupid, the rich and poor, the noble and lowly, whose conditions seem to
differ as greatly as the clouds and the mud. The reason for this is clear. In the
Jitsugokyd we read that if a man does not learn he will be ignorant, and that a
man who is ignorant is stupid. Therefore the distinction between wise and
stupid comes down to a matter of education.10

Strongly influenced by British utilitarianism and by the then current
Western idea of the perfectibility of man through education, Fukuzawa be-
came a staunch advocate of modern education, with the emphasis partic-
ularly on practical subjects. He vigorously denounced the social inequities
and indignities of Tokugawa feudalism and declared that all men should
be free and all countries independent on the basis of “natural reason.”
The democratic idealism that Fukuzawa thus espoused was concurrently
reflected in the new7 Meiji government’s attitude toward education. Dedi-
cating itself to the goal of universal primary education on the American
model, the government’s 1872 ordinance founding a new public school
system contained the vow that “in no village will there be a family with-
out learning and in no household will there be an uneducated person.”

In praising Western ways and advocating that Japan adopt them, Fuku-
zawa heaped withering criticism on his own country’s ways and traditions:

244

Encounter with the West

If we compare the knowledge of the Japanese and Westerners, in letters, in
techniques, in commerce, or in industry, from the largest to the smallest
matter . . . there is not one thing in which we excel. . . . Outside of the most
stupid person in the world, no one would say that our learning and business
is on a par with those of the Western countries. Who would compare our
carts with their locomotives, or our swords with their pistols? We speak of the
yin and yang and the five elements; they have discovered 60 elements. . . . We
think we dwell on an immovable plain; they know that the earth is round and
moves. We think that our country is the most sacred, divine land; they travel
about the world opening lands and establishing countries. ... In Japan's
present condition there is nothing in which we may take pride vis-a-vis the
West. All that Japan has to be proud of ... is its scenery.11

Unlike most of the other members of the Meirokusha, Fukuzawa
steadfastly refused to enter the service of the Meiji government and in-
sisted upon the importance of maintaining his independence as a social
critic. The sensitivity of the Meiji Six enlighteners in general to changes
in government attitude, however, was revealed in 1875 when, as the result
of issuance by the government of a restrictive press law, they ceased
publication of the Meiji Six Magazine and soon terminated the activities
of its parent society. Amid the continuing enthusiasm for civilization and
enlightenment, the government had found itself faced in the mid-1870s
with a newly organized political opposition; and the predominantly
government-oriented membership of the Meirokusha deemed it prudent
to dissolve an organization that might be viewed as sympathetic to that
opposition.

The Meiji Restoration had been carried out under the euphoric slogan
of a “return to antiquity”; in fact, the restorationists do not appear to
have had any concrete political plan other than to wrest power from the
tottering shogunate. As leaders of the new Meiji government, they
launched the country on the road to civilization and enlightenment and
encouraged aspirations among the Japanese people for “independence,”
“freedom,” and “individual rights,” concepts taken from British liberal
democracy, which absorbed the thinking of Japanese officials and intel-
lectuals during the first decade or so of the Meiji period. But, although a
fewT extreme Westernizing enthusiasts suggested that Japan establish a
republic, no one of importance went so far as to advocate that a “free”
people should also have the right to select their own government. The
new political and intellectual leadership of Meiji Japan came almost
entirely from the samurai class; and, while vociferously attacking the evils
of Tokugawa feudalism, they retained the feudalistic attitude that the
masses were by nature inert and stupid. It was their purpose to enlighten
the people, not to make them politically active but to “enrich the coun-
try” and thereby strengthen it vis-a-vis the nations of the West. Even the
iconoclastic and utilitarian-minded Fukuzawa was not prepared to en-

Encounter with the West

245

courage a critical attitude on the part of the people toward the govern-
ment. When political opposition did arise in the 1870s, it was the result
not of a movement from without but of a factional dispute within the
government itself.

The leaders of the Meiji Restoration were primarily samurai from the
domains of Satsuma, Choshu, Tosa, and Hizen. From the outset, how-
ever, the Satsuma-Choshu men formed a separate clique, based on the
pact between their two domains that had been so important in the over-
throw of the Tokugawa shogunate, and increasingly they monopolized
real power in the new government. The dissatisfaction that this created
among the samurai of Tosa and Hizen was transformed into a national
issue in the Korean invasion crisis of 1873. The ostensible issue in the
1873 crisis was how to deal with a rebuff by Korea to Japanese overtures
to open diplomatic and commercial relations. Most of the Tosa and Hizen
leaders in the government urged a hard line, including the possibility of
invading Korea; but the Satsuma-Choshu clique, with the notable excep-
tion of Saigo Takamori (1827-77) of Satsuma, counseled restraint on the
grounds that Japan was still too weak to risk any foreign involvement.
When the views of the “peace” party prevailed, Saigo and other members
of the “war” party left the government.

Although the Satsuma-Choshu clique had won a major victory and
had further strengthened its hold on the government, it now had power-
ful enemies on the outside. Some of these enemies turned to open rebel-
lion, leading armies composed of samurai who were discontented with
the progressive policies of the Meiji government. The most serious of
these uprisings was the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, led by Saigo Taka-
mori. More than any other Restoration leader, Saigo felt a continuing
attachment to the ideals of the samurai class. His bellicose attitude at
the time of the 1873 crisis was based largely on his belief that the samurai
of Japan could and should deal with a foreign insult by taking direct mili-
tary action. In assuming leadership of the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877,
Saigo made a last gallant gesture for feudal privilege and became the great
romantic hero of modern Japan. At the same time, the failure of the
Satsuma Rebellion also marked the last attempt to oppose the Meiji gov-
ernment through force.

Of far greater historical significance was the demand made by other
samurai leaders, who had also been members of the war party in 1873,
that participation in government be expanded through the establishment
of an elected assembly. In 1874 a group of samurai, led by Itagaki Tai-
suke (1837-1919) of Tosa, submitted a memorial to the throne attacking
the absolutist Satsuma-Choshu regime in the following terms:

Present political power does not rest with the Emperor, nor with the people.

It is monopolized entirely by one group of officials. If the absolutism of these

246

Encounter with the West

officials is not corrected, it could mean the downfall of the nation. Moreover

the only means of correction would be to establish an assembly elected by the

people and to expand discussions concerning the country.12

The government replied that it was too soon to consider giving “the
people” a voice in political affairs. Actually, it is doubtful that any of the
memorialists had in mind an electorate that would include more than a
small percentage of the Japanese people. The memorialists were former
samurai who espoused ideas of parliamentary democracy at this time pri-
marily as a means to attack the Satsuma-Choshu oligarchs in the Meiji
government. Although the people's rights (minken) movement they thus
launched eventually became a campaign for full democracy, including
universal manhood suffrage, it was by no means a “popular” undertaking
in its origins.

One response of the government to the people’s rights movement was
to issue the press law in 1875 that caused dissolution of the Meirokusha.
This law and others repressive of the freedoms of speech and assembly
were aimed at curbing the efforts by Itagaki and his allies to form political
parties. Nevertheless, the emergent party advocates continued to press
their demands, and, in the same year, 1875, Itagaki formed the first
national political association, the Patriotic Party (Aikokusha). But it was
not until 1881 that the minken people received a public commitment from
the oligarchs that they would eventually be given the opportunity to par-
ticipate in government.

In 1881 Okuma Shigenobu (1838-1922), one of the last of the non-
Satsuma-Choshu statesmen still in the government, was relieved of his
position as the result of disclosures he made about corruption in high
office. In the wake of Okuma’s dismissal, the government secured an im-
perial edict promising a constitution and the opening of a national par-
liament within nine years, or by 1890. Although it may appear that
Okuma thus forced a concession from the Satsuma-Choshu oligarchs, in
fact the latter had for long been considering how and when a constitu-
tional form of government should be established in Japan, and the action
of Okuma in 1881 probably did not appreciably alter their plans, although
they may not have wished to reveal them publicly so soon.

The Meiji oligarchs were, by any criterion, extraordinarily capable and
farsighted men who took a strongly pragmatic approach to problems.
Once secure in power they did indeed tend toward the authoritarian in
consonance with their samurai backgrounds. But one advantage of their
functioning as oligarchs was that, immune from the everyday strife of
elected politicians, they could concentrate on the pursuit of loftier goals
for the betterment of Japan. They were committed to making Japan into
a truly modern state, and national constitutions were an integral part of
modernist thinking everywhere in this age. The man who assumed chief

Encounter with the West

247

responsibility for writing the Meiji Constitution was Ito Hirobumi (1841-
1909) of Choshu. In 1882 he went to Europe to study Western constitu-
tionalism, particularly as propounded by German theorists; and, in 1885,
he became Japan’s first prime minister upon the institution of a cabinet
system of government.

Meanwhile, the people’s rights advocates were also active, and both
Itagaki and Okuma formed new political associations — the Liberal Party
(Jiyuto) and the Progressive Party (Shimpoto)— in preparation for the
opening of a parliament (or Diet) within the decade. It is difficult to
assess precisely the differences between the two major party lines estab-
lished at this time. The works of Rousseau, Mill, and other Western polit-
ical theorists had been translated into Japanese and were widely read and
admired by the party people. French natural rights democracy seems to
have appealed particularly to the Itagaki group, while Okuma and his
followers espoused British utilitarianism. Moreover, whereas the Liberal
Party came in general to represent agrarian interests, the Progressive
Party tended to align itself with the emerging class of urban industrialists.
Yet, far more than any political creeds, specific issues, or class alliances,
it was personal allegiance to the leaders themselves that provided the basis
for party unity during this preconstitutional phase of the people’s rights
movement.

In addition to the political parties, an important source of burgeoning
opposition to the Meiji oligarchy was the press. A number of the embry-
onic newspapers of the early Restoration period had been staffed by
former shogunate officials hostile to the new Satsuma and Choshu leaders
in the government. With the continued growth of a modern press, this
opposition was taken up by journalists who were largely former samurai
excluded from government by han cliquism. Many members of the emer-
gent political parties, in fact, first got their start in journalism. Moreover,
many newspapers founded in the early Meiji period were intended by
their founders to serve as mouthpieces for specific political and social
views, almost invariably of an antigovernment tone. Hence, journalism in
modern Japan was in its early development distinctly a journalism of pro-
test, and it was to a great extent for this reason that the Meiji oligarchs
so readily and frequently attacked journalists through the issuance of re-
strictive press laws.

The temper of the 1880s in Japan was markedly different from that of
the 1870s. For the first decade or so following the Restoration, the Japa-
nese had pursued with great, and often indiscriminate, enthusiasm the
remaking of their country on Western lines. In the 1880s, they not only
modified their earlier, naive admiration for the West but also began to
reassess and find new value in their native traditions. For the oligarchs,
it became incumbent to enunciate a coherent ideology for the state they

248

Encounter with the Wen

were in the process of constitutionally fashioning. The way in which they
did this can be seen most clearly in their policy toward education.

In its act of 1872, the Meiji government had proclaimed the goal of
universal primary education, and, during most of the remainder of the
decade, it had sought to provide training to Japanese schoolchildren that
stressed practical subjects and encouraged Western-style individualistic
thinking. But, by the beginning of the 1880s, the official attitude had
changed and the government now took deliberate steps both to reinstate
traditional moral training in the schools and to redefine the aim of edu-
cation to serve the state rather than the individual. The culmination of
this new policy toward education was the issuance in 1890 of the Impe-
rial Rescript on Education, a brief document that began as follows:

Know ye, Our Subjects!

Our Imperial Ancestors have founded Our Empire on a basis broad and
everlasting, and have deeply and firmly implanted virtue; Our subjects ever
united in loyalty and filial piety have from generation to generation illustrated
the beauty thereof. This is the glory of the fundamental character of Our
Empire, and herein also lies the source of Our education.13

From these few lines it is obvious that, after its earlier flirtation with the
ideals of Western liberalism and democracy, the Meiji government in its
critical education policy had determined to indoctrinate a social ideology
derived mainly from the Shinto-Confucian concepts that had evolved as
a new orthodoxy of thought in the late Tokugawa period. Morality was
once again to be based on such hierarchical virtues as loyalty and filial
piety, and the ultimate object of devotion for all Japanese citizens was to
be the throne, described elsewhere in the Rescript on Education as
“coeval with heaven and earth.” The new Japanese state was, in short, to
be conceived as a great and obedient Confucian family with a father-like
emperor at its head.

Nor was the government alone in its shift to conservatism in the 1880s.
Even the blatant Westernizers like Fukuzawa Yukichi began to have sec-
ond thoughts about Japan’s previously uncritical acceptance of everything
Western in its rush to become civilized and enlightened. To a great extent,
such second thoughts were simply the result of a more sophisticated view
of the West. In their initial, excited response to the utopian ideals of
liberal democracy, many intellectuals (although not the leaders of the
Iwakura Mission) had failed to temper their pro- Westernism by acknowl-
edging that the Western powers themselves were pursuing baldly self-
interested policies of world imperialism. Western theorists sought to jus-
tify these policies on the grounds of the social-Darwinist doctrines of
Herbert Spencer: before the world could achieve a pacific stage of fully
industrialized and enlightened civilization, it must continue to engage in a
militant selection process that promised survival to the fittest races and
nations.

Encounter with the West

249

It is to the credit of the Meiji oligarchs, who were usually far more
realistic than their critics, that they always kept in mind the aim of en-
riching Japan in order to strengthen it militarily. In 1873 they had avoided
armed intervention in Korea because it was too dangerous, but even then
they envisioned a time when Japan would be able to compete for empire
with the West. On the other hand, nongovernmental intellectuals and the
public in general did not, for the most part, come to accept the need for
more statist-oriented policies and the open pursuit of nationalistic goals
until the 1880s.

Overridingly the most important nationalistic goal of the 1880s and
early 1 890s was revision of the unequal treaties, and the repeated failure
of the government to achieve revision contributed not only to growing
skepticism about the West but also to the spread of conservative, Japanist
sentiments. In one spectacular breakdown of treaty talks in 1888, Okuma
Shigenobu, who had been drawn temporarily back into the government
as a foreign minister, lost a leg when a fanatical member of a right-wing
organization threw a bomb into his carriage.

Symbolic to many Japanese of their frustrations and humiliation over
treaty revision was a Western-style building in downtown Tokyo called the
Rokumeikan or Deer Cry Mansion. Constructed in 1883 for the purpose
of entertaining foreign diplomats and dignitaries, the Rokumeikan was
the scene of many festive and gala entertainments, the most notoriously
memorable of which was a masquerade ball thrown by Prime Minister
Ito in 1887. Affairs like the 1887 ball in the Rokumeikan were regarded
as the most conspicuous examples of how ludicrously even high-ranking
Japanese could behave in their desire to prove to Westerners that they

Fig. 65 “Scene of Constitutional Law Proclamation Ceremony,” by Hashi-
moto Chikanobu (1838-1912), showing gentlemen in Western-style uniforms
and ladies in dresses with bustles at the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution
(Honolulu Academy of Am, Bequest of Normal D. Hill, 1938 [10,953])

250

Encounter with the West

were civilized and knew the social graces (fig. 65). A decade or so earlier,
such conduct would probably have been hailed as enlightened and pro-
gressive: it was a sign of the changed temper of the times that Ito and his
ministers were disparagingly dubbed “the dancing cabinet.”

It should not be supposed that the opposition to over- Westernization
and the turn to conservatism in the 1880s was either universal or un-
thinkingly reactionary. Some extremely radical nationalists (like Okuma’s
assailant) did appear on the scene, but many prominent people remained
highly committed to Westernization; and even those who most articu-
lately called for a reassessment of traditional values more often than not
advocated that Japan discriminately select what was appropriate for it
from both East and West. As one of them, speaking about Western civil-
ization, put it:

We recognize the excellence of Western civilization. We value the Western
theory of rights, liberty, and equality; and we respect Western philosophy and
morals. We have affection for some Western customs. Above all, we esteem
Western science, economics, and industry. These, however, are not to be
adopted simply because they are Western; they ought to be adopted only if
they can contribute to Japan’s welfare. Thus we seek not to revive a narrow*
xenophobia, but rather to promote the national spirit in an atmosphere of
brotherhood.14

The debate that emerged in the late 1880s over Westernization versus
traditionalism was conducted principally by the members of a new gen-
eration whose most impressionable years of intellectual growth had been
spent during the epochal, but highly unsettling, period of transition from
Tokugawa to Meiji. To a far greater extent than their elders, like the
Meiji oligarchs and Fukuzawa Yukichi, they felt the intense cultural un-
certainty of being torn between a Japan that had always represented the
past and a West that invariably stood for the future.

Among those of the new generation who most fully embraced West-
ernization was Tokutomi Soho (1863-1 9 57). 15 The son of a wealthy
peasant family of the Kumamoto region of northern Kyushu, Tokutomi
received Western training as a youth in his native Kumamoto and later
studied at the Christian university, Doshisha, in Kyoto. In the mid- 1880s,
Tokutomi moved to Tokyo, where he took up a career as a writer and
journalist. He organized a group called the Min’yusha (Society of the
People's Friends) and in 1887 began publication of a magazine entitled
Friend of the People (Kokumin no Tomo) to express the group’s views.

Tokutomi, whose magazine soon achieved an enormous circulation,
forcefully advanced his own opinions in books and articles on the
progress of modern Japan. He criticized the kind of Westernization advo-
cated by Fukuzawa and other enlighteners of the early Meiji period
because it was directed only toward acquisition of the material aspects of

Encounter with the West

251

Western civilization and not its underlying spirit. At the same time*
Tokutomi pointed out the futility of pursuing the pre-Meiji ideal of
“Eastern morals and Western technology*” which was precisely what the
Meiji government seemed to be doing then in its policy of reinstituting
Confucian moral training in the public schools. Under the new policy,
Japanese students were expected simultaneously to learn modern, prac-
tical things and feudal morality. According to Tokutomi, the only pos-
sible choice for Japan, if it was to succeed in modernization, was to reject
the Japanese past entirely and pursue wholeheartedly both the material
and spiritual aspects of Western civilization.

Tokutomi, who was strongly influenced by the writings of Herbert
Spencer, justified his extreme position on the grounds that progress was
a universal phenomenon. Hence, Westernization was actually another
term for universalization. The features of modern civilization observable
in the Western countries were the same that would appear in all countries
as they advanced toward modernity. Japan already had many of these
modern features and should seek to acquire the remainder as speedily as
possible.

The principal challenge to the views of Tokutomi and the Min’yusha
came from the Seikyosha (Society for Political Education), founded in
1888 by another group of young writers and critics. Publishing the
magazine The Japanese (Nihonjin) in competition with the Min’yusha’s
Friend of the People , the Seikyosha people attacked Westernization and
called for “preservation of the national essence” (kokusui hozon). Their
general position was perhaps best presented in the book Truth , Goodness ,
and Beauty of the Japanese (Shin-zen-bi Nihonjin) by Miyake Setsurei
(1860-1945). Miyake, a student of philosophy who remained a rival of
Tokutomi throughout their long, concurrent careers, asserted that al-
though a Spencerian type of struggle among nations was unavoidable
during the course of historical progress, the process of modernization
did not lead inevitably to a universal kind of state. On the contrary,
nations competed best by utilizing those special qualities that distin-
guished them from others. Like many members of the Seikyosha, Miyake
was much interested in physical geography and placed great store in the
effects of geography and climate on the molding of racial characteristics
and national cultures. To his thinking, diversity among peoples and
nations was fundamental to progress in the world, and any attempt to
reject national customs and indiscriminately adopt the ways of others
could only be harmful. It was, in any event, clear that the Western coun-
tries were clinging tenaciously to their own particularistic national cul-
tures, even while commonly pursuing modernization.

The advocates of preserving the national essence made many effective
points in their arguments against the Westernizers, and, in theory, they
provided the Japanese with a much-needed feeling of cultural worth

252

Encounter with the West

after some two decades of breathtaking change within the ever-present
shadow of the more advanced and “superior” West. A concomitant to
the Seikyosha movement, for example, was a renewal of interest in
Japan’s classical literature even at a time, as we shall see, when Japanese
writers were first beginning to produce a modern literature under the
dominant influence of the West. Ancient works, including collections of
waka poetry, were reprinted one after another, and especially great
excitement was aroused over the rediscovery of Genroku literature. The
prose of Saikaku, the puppet plays of Chikamatsu, and the poems of
Basho were resuscitated, annotated, and made available to a wide read-
ing public.

Unfortunately, the concept of preserving the national essence, while
emotionally stimulating, did not lend itself to very precise definition,
and the Seikyosha writers were never able to present a convincing pro-
gram of action. Moreover, even though they were generally reasonable-
minded people themselves, their views tended to provide fuel for the
xenophobes and extreme nationalists; and, in subsequent years, as Japan
embarked upon overseas expansion, preservation of the national essence
became synonymous with ultranationalism.

Intertwined with the debate in the mid-Meiji period over such ques-
tions as the modern (Western?) spirit and Japan’s national essence was
the major problem of Christianity. The leaders of the Meiji Restoration
had little if any personal interest in Christianity, although some, like Ita-
gaki Taisuke, the pioneer in the people’s rights movement, conjectured
that it might be an essential element in modernization. On the other
hand, many of the intellectuals of the new generation of the 1880s and
1890s, including Tokutomi Soh5, were powerfully, and in some cases
decisively, affected by Christian teachings.

The centuries-old ban on Christianity was not immediately lifted at
the time of the Restoration. Not until 1873, after the Iwakura Mission ob-
served how highly the Westerners treasured their religion, was it quietly
legalized in Japan. Meanwhile, Western missionaries — particularly Amer-
ican and British Protestants — had already entered the country and begun
their activities, including the compilation of English-Japanese dictionaries
and translation of the Bible into Japanese. One field in which the mis-
sionaries performed especially valuable service was education. While the
government concentrated on developing a national system of primary
education, foreign missionaries and prominent Japanese independently
established private schools to provide much of the higher training essen-
tial to Japan’s modernizing program. Among the well-known private col-
leges founded about this time were the Christian university, Doshisha,
in Kyoto, and Keio University and Waseda University in Tokyo, founded
respectively by Fukuzawa Yukichi and Okuma Shigenobu.

Many of the youths most strongly influenced by Christianity were

Encounter with the West

253

samurai from domains that had been on the losing side in the Restora-
tion.16 Restricted in the opportunities open to them in the new govern-
ment, these youths sought alternate routes to advancement through the
acquisition of Western training. When brought into direct contact with
foreign Christian teachers, they were particularly impressed with the
moral caliber and fervid personal commitment of most of these men. To
the young and impressionable Japanese, the foreign teachers appeared
to possess qualities of character very similar to the ideal samurai and
Confucian scholars of their own traditional backgrounds. Indeed, many
Japanese who converted to Christianity in the 1870s and 1880s seem to
have viewed it as a kind of modern extension of Confucianism.

For their part, the American missionary and lay Christian teachers
who came to Japan in the 1870s also responded with high enthusiasm
toward their Japanese students. The faith of these men, who were im-
bued with the religious spirit of late nineteenth-century New England,
was rooted in the belief that God’s work on earth was to be carried out
by individuals acting in accordance with a high moral code and the dic-
tates of their Christian consciences. They were not particularly con-
cerned with questions of dogma and abstract theology but wished to
build strong characters; and they were quick to appreciate the features
of good character, derived from the samurai code of conduct, that they
detected in many of their students.

Tokutomi Soho was one of a famous group of thirty-five Japanese
youths, known as the Kumamoto band, who in 1875 climbed a hill in
their native domain of Kumamoto in Kyushu and pledged themselves to
Christianity and to propagation of the faith in order to dispel ignorance
and enlighten the people. These youths were students at a school for
Western studies in Kumamoto conducted by Leroy L. Janes, a West Point
graduate and former military officer in the American Civil War, and sev-
eral of them went on to become distinguished spokesmen for Christian-
ity in Japan. Although Tokutomi himself later renounced his formal ties
with the church, he retained the Protestant Christian belief in “inner
freedom” and the individual’s duty to use his independent conscience as
a guide to social and political behavior. It was on the basis of this belief
that he attacked the kind of Confucian morality the Meiji government
sought to inculcate in the primary schools from the 1880s on that called
upon all Japanese to give blind and unquestioning loyalty to the state.

The influence of Protestant Christianity on Japanese who came to
criticize the strongly statist policies of the government in the mid-Meiji
period can be seen not only in independent intellectuals like Tokutomi,
but also in many individuals who entered the socialist movement after
its beginnings in the 1890s. In fact, a number of the most prominent
Christians in modern Japan have also been leading socialists. Still other
Christians, however, were driven by the unfavorable climate for their

254

Encounter with the West

views after the commencement of parliamentary government in 1890 to
withdraw entirely from the arena of political and social criticism and to
devote themselves to the private cultivation of their religion. The best-
known example of these Christians was Uchimura Kanzo (1861-1930).

Uchimura, the son of a samurai, attended a Christian-influenced
agricultural school in the northern island of Hokkaido and became a
student of Dr. William S. Clark, an American lay teacher who, like Janes
at Kumamoto, was successful in attracting young Japanese to the faith.
Later, Uchimura went to the United States to study at Amherst, and it
was there that he was converted to Christianity. In 1891 Uchimura
created a sensation back in Japan when, as a teacher at the esteemed
First High School in Tokyo, he refused to bow before a copy of the
Imperial Rescript on Education. He was branded a traitor by some
people, forced to resign his position for the offense of lese majeste, and
became the target of polemical attacks that charged him with possessing
allegiances incompatible with the responsibilities to emperor and nation
required of subjects in the educational rescript.17 Uchimura thus became
a victim of the shift in attitude, on the part of the Japanese public and
many intellectuals, from the open and naive internationalism of the
1870s to an illiberal, virulent nationalism. Although he worked for an-
other decade or so in journalism, Uchimura eventually retired from
public view to a life of private teaching and writing on religion.

Contrary to the assertions of his detractors, Uchimura did not em-
brace Christianity to the exclusion of national loyalty. He steadfastly
proclaimed his devotion to the “two JY’ — Jesus and Japan — and insisted
that, just as Anglicans were essentially English Christians, Presbyterians
were Scottish Christians, and Lutherans were German Christians, he was
a Japanese Christian. At the same time, he readily acknowledged that try-
ing to be both Christian and Japanese was apt to please neither Christians
nor Japanese:

I do not know which I love more, Jesus or Japan.

I am hated by my countrymen for Jesus’ sake as yaso [a Christian], and I
am disliked by foreign missionaries for Japan’s sake as national and narrow.

No matter; I may lose all my friends, but I cannot lose Jesus and Japan.18

Uchimura even founded a “non-church” (mukydkai) movement in an
attempt to deracinate Christianity from its alien institutions and tradi-
tions by eliminating its clerical organization and other ecclesiastical trap-
pings, and to render it as much Japanese as Western. For his epitaph he
wrote in English:

I for Japan;

Japan for the World;

The World for Christ;

And All for God.19

Encounter with the West

255

Even when it enjoyed its greatest popularity in the Meiji period,
Christianity could never claim as its own more than a very small per-
centage of the population of Japan (less than one-half of 1 percent); and
after the turn to conservatism in the late 1880s and 1890s, it lost any
opportunity it may have had to become a major force in Japanese life.
Moreover, even if it had not been seen as a threat to the statist views
rendered newly orthodox in the Meiji Constitution of 1889 and the Im-
perial Rescript on Education, Christianity would have (and indeed has)
suffered from sectarianism in Japan, a sectarianism that had been kept
to a minimum by American Protestant missionaries in the palmy days of
successful proselytizing during the first two decades of Meiji. Apart
from its work in such fields as education and medicine and the profound
influence it exerted on certain individuals, like the ones we have been
examining here, Christianity has been of negligible importance in modern
Japan.

The Meiji Constitution was written in secret by Ito Hirobumi and his
colleagues and was presented to the Japanese people in 1889 as a gift
from the emperor. It was based on a carefully considered mixture of con-
servative and liberal principles (with the former heavily outweighing the
latter) that owed much to the constitutional theories of Germany, the
Western country the Meiji oligarchs had come increasingly to regard as
most analogous to Japan in historical background and stage of modern-
ization. The conservative character of the Constitution may, for purposes
of illustration, be noted in several major areas. First, an appointive House
of Peers was given equal lawmaking powers with an elective House of
Representatives. Second, the personal liberties granted to the Japanese
people were all made “subject to the limitations imposed by law”; in
other words, such liberties were not to be inalienable but might be (and
often were) restricted by government decree.

But the most strongly conservative feature of the Meiji Constitution
was the great power it allowed the executive branch of government. This
power derived in large part from omission; that is, from the deliberate
failure to specify how the executive was to be formed and what were to
constitute the precise limits of its authority. There was no provision at
all, for example, for appointment of the prime minister, and no proviso
about accountability of the other ministers of state in the cabinet to any-
one except the emperor. Clearly, the oligarchs intended to retain firm
control of the executive, and, after the opening of the first Diet in 1890,
the party members in the House of Representatives found very little
prospect that they would in the near future be able to participate sig-
nificantly in the ruling of Japan. The oligarchs formed an extralegal
body known as the genrd or “elders,” consisting at first entirely of the
highest Satsuma and Choshu leaders in government, and it was they

256

Encounter with the West

who selected the prime ministers (from among themselves) and con-
tinued to dominate the affairs of state.

The sociopolitical orthodoxy that the oligarchs codified in the Meiji
Constitution and the Imperial Rescript on Education is commonly called
kokutai, a term that literally means the body of the country but is usually
translated as “national polity.” Based on the Shinto-Confucian concept
(which we observed in the Rescript on Education) of Japan as a great
family-state, kokutai held a special appeal for the Japanese people be-
cause of its glorification of the mystique of emperorship. The Japanese
regarded their line of sovereigns — described in the Constitution as “un-
broken for ages eternal” and in the Rescript on Education as “coeval with
heaven and earth” — as a unique and sacrosanct institution that gave
Japan a claim to superiority over all other countries in the world. For cen-
turies, of course, the emperors of Japan had wielded no political power
whatever, and during the Tokugawa period they were held virtual pris-
oners in Kyoto by the shogunate. Nevertheless, the throne had served as
an incomparably effective rallying point for nationalistic sentiment during
the difficult and dangerous transition to the modern era. Although per-
haps relatively ignored during the liberal euphoria of the 1870s, it inevit-
ably drew the renewed attention of government leaders and conservative
intellectuals in the 1880s. For nothing was more venerably Japanese than
the imperial institution, and anyone wishing to revive traditional values,
whether moral or cultural, was almost perforce obliged to start with rec-
ognition of the throne as the font of Japanese civilization. No simple
explanation, however, can be given of the throne’s role in modern Japan.
For the most part the emperor has been held “above politics” and, with
few exceptions, his participation in governmental affairs has not been
made public. But there can be no question that, as the living embodiment
of kokutaiy he was a potent symbol for radically nationalistic emotions in
the period up through World War II.

A corollary to emperor glorification in the kokutai ideology was that,
of all the peacetime occupations, government service was the most cher-
ished because it meant, in effect, employment by the emperor. Although
the Satsuma-Choshu oligarchs continued to control the highest councils
of state, a vast expansion of the bureaucracy during the final years of the
nineteenth century created ample opportunities for good careers in gov-
ernment, careers that were avidly sought by youths of all classes. Tokyo
Imperial University, moreover, was made a kind of orthodox channel for
governmental preferment, further proof of the degree to which Japanese
society and the aspirations of its members were subjected to state manip-
ulation in the middle and late Meiji period.

Japanese prose literature by the time of the Meiji Restoration had sunk
to an extremely low level. Tedious didacticism, bawdy comedy, and

Encounter with the West

257

bloody adventure were the stock-in-trade of the authors of these years,
and there was little prospect, in the absence of stimulation from outside,
that the quality of their work would soon improve. But this remains
conjecture, for the fact is that, within a few decades of the Restoration,
Western influences had wrought a change in prose literature as profound
as in any other area of Japanese culture during the modern era.

The most successful writer in the years immediately before and after
the Restoration was Kanagaki Robun, an edokko or “child of Edo” who
specialized in the traditional genre of “witty books” (kokkeibon). One of
Robun’s post-Restoration works was A Journey by Foot Through Western
Lands ( Seiyo Dochu Hizakurige ), in which he attempted to give a modern
twist to Jippensha Ikku’s famous story of two rogues frolicking their way
down the Tokaido from Edo to Kyoto; another was Eating Beef Stew
Cross-Legged , the parody on the aping of Western customs that we noted
earlier in this chapter. A prime example of Robun’s irreverent humor
can be observed in the title of still another of his books, Kyuri Zukai.
This title was phonetically the same as Fukuzawa Yukichi’s Physics Illus-
trated; but, in the Sinico-Japanese characters used by Robun, it meant
On the Use of Cucumbers. Such punning was of course frivolous, an adjec-
tive that may be applied to much of the work done by Robun and his
fellow Edo authors. Although these men continued to hold the center of
the literary stage for a while, they produced almost nothing that was
memorable. The future of Meiji literature lay clearly in the assimilation
of powerful artistic ideas and styles then being imported from the West.

In the first decade or so of Meiji, those Japanese writers and scholars
interested in foreign literature devoted themselves mainly to the transla-
tion of famous Western works. An adaptation of Robinson Crusoe had, in
fact, been completed even before the Restoration, and a Japanese ren-
dering of Aesop's Fables existed as one of the few products of the old
Jesuit press that had survived the attempt by the Tokugawa shogunate to
eradicate all traces of contact with the Catholic Christian countries
during the century from the 1540s to the 1630s. Among the earliest
Western translations to appear in print in the Meiji period was Samuel
Smiles’s Self-Help, a book of success stories whose very title suggests the
kind of subject matter that Japan’s passionate new devotees of civilization
and enlightenment were most likely to appreciate.

One of the first modern Western novels to be translated into Japanese
was Bulwer-Lytton’s Ernest Maltr avers, the tale of a modern man’s inge-
nuity and self-motivated drive to succeed (although the translator of this
work saw fit to give it the erotically provocative Japanese title of Karyu
Shunwa or A Spring Tale of Flozvers and Willows in the hope of boosting
its sales). For most of the first two decades of Meiji, Japanese translators
of Western fiction concentrated overwhelmingly on the writings of British
authors, a clear reflection of the enormous prestige in Japanese eyes of

258

Encounter with the West

British civilization compared to that of any other country of the West.
In addition to Bulwer-Lytton, prominent British authors translated into
Japanese during the early Meiji period included Scott and Disraeli.

The Japanese were especially taken with tales of modern and “scien-
tific” adventures, as can be seen in the popularity of Jules Verne’s Around
the World in Eighty Days and A Trip to the Moon. And from about the early
1880s on, largely in response to the movement for parliamentary govern-
ment, they became infatuated with political novels. The translated writ-
ings of Disraeli and Bulwer-Lytton helped make respectable the practice
of prose writing, which members of the ruling samurai class of the
Tokugawa period had for the most part eschewed as vulgar; and during
the 1880s many prominent members of the embryonic parties tried their
hands at politically oriented novels. A good many of these novels dealt
with the present, but others were set in such disparate times and places
as ancient Greece, Ming China, France during the Revolution, and even
a hypothetical Japan in the 173rd year of Meiji (a.d. 2040, one hundred
fifty years after the opening of the first Diet in 1890).

Some idea of the growing consciousness in the 1880s of Japanese
achievements and the anticipation that Japan would assume a more asser-
tive international role can be seen in a passage from one of these political
novels entitled Strange Encounters of Elegant Females (Kajin no Kigu),
written in 1885 by Shiba Shiro under the nom de plume of the Wanderer
of the Eastern Seas. Far from being an account of romance and passion,
as the title would seem to suggest, Strange Encounters is the story of the
Wanderer’s investigation into revolutionary activities throughout the
world. At the outset, he meets two strikingly beautiful European ladies,
one Spanish and one Irish (although both graced by the author with
Chinese names), at the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The three enter
into serious discussion about matters of political repression and revolu-
tion and, even after the Wanderer departs for other foreign lands, the
ladies periodically reappear to meet him on his travels. Although they
are obviously in love with him, the Wanderer can think only of the need
for promoting freedom and justice in the world. At one point, the Spanish
lady encourages him by saying:

Now that your country has reformed its government and, by taking from
America what is useful and rejecting what is only superficial, is increasing
month by month in wealth and strength, the eyes and ears of the world are
astonished by your success. As the sun climbs in the eastern skies, so is your
country rising in the Orient. Your August Sovereign has granted political lib-
erty to the people, the people have sworn to follow the Imperial leadership.
So the time has come when, domestic strife having ceased, all classes will be
happy in their occupations. Korea will send envoys and the Luchu Islands
will submit to your governance. Then will the occasion arise for doing great
things in the Far East. Your country will take the lead and preside over a con-

Encounter with the West

259

federation of Asia. The peoples of the East will no longer be in danger. In the
West you will restrain the rampancy of England and France. In the South you
will check the corruption of China. In the North you will thwart the designs
of Russia. You will resist the policy of European states, which is to treat Far
Eastern peoples with contempt and to interfere in their domestic affairs, so
leading them into servitude. Thus it is your country and no other that can
bring the taste of self-government and independence into the life of millions
for the first time, and so spread the light of civilization.20

A major problem for both translators of Western books and writers of
Western-inspired political novels was that of style. Tokugawa authors had
employed several methods of writing, from the poetic use of alternating
metrical lines of five and seven syllables to a style derived from Sinico-
Japanese. The gap between these classical styles and the colloquial lan-
guage of everyday speech was enormous, and the difficulty of devising a
means to reproduce in Japanese the vernacular novels of the modern
West taxed the ingenuity of the most dedicated of Meiji translators. As a
result, most of the renditions of Western novels in the early Meiji period
were not true translations at all, but rather were free adaptations of the
original works. During the 1880s, a movement was begun to “unify the
spoken and written languages” (gembun-itchi) , but it faced formidable
difficulties, as the following comments of an aspiring novelist of the time
suggest:

Ever since someone argued that the correspondence between spoken and writ-
ten languages was a good proof of civilization, people have begun to worry
about the style of our language. But we still have a great enemy in habit and
inertia. Any new and unfamiliar style provokes people preoccupied only with
the surface of things and invites their negative comments like “vulgar” and
“inelegant.” In the face of these charges, no one dares to try the colloquial
style exclusively. . . . Some people seem to be giving up the idea of matching
spoken and written styles as hopeless in present-day Japan. But they are too
impatient. Of course, the elegant style may have something that colloquialism
does not; but in the hands of a skilled writer, colloquialism can offer an inde-
scribable gracefulness with a discipline all its own, which is in no sense infe-
rior to the elegant written style.21

Toward the end of the decade, Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909), author
of Japan’s first truly modern novel, was also the first successfully to
bridge the gap between speech and writing. With continuing progress in
education, growth of the mass media, and acceptance of the Tokyo dialect
as the standard form of speech, the modern Japanese vernacular or kogo
was finally evolved, although it was not used widely by novelists until after
the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, by the authors of primary school text-
books until 1903, or by newspaper reporters in general until a decade
after that.

The man who more than any other made possible the writing of a

260

Encounter with the West

modern prose literature in Japan was Tsubouchi Shoyo (1859-1935). 22
A graduate of Tokyo Imperial University and translator of the collected
works of Shakespeare, Tsubouchi published an epochal tract in 1885 en-
titled The Essence of the Novel (Shdsetsu Shinzui). In it he attacked what
he regarded as the deplorable state of literature in Japan during his day:

It has long been the custom in Japan to consider the novel as an instrument
of education, and it has frequently been proclaimed that the novel’s chief
function is the castigation of vice and the encouragement of virtue. In actual
practice, however, only stories of bloodthirsty cruelty or else of pornography
are welcomed, and very few readers indeed even cast so much as a glance on
works of a more serious nature. Moreover, since popular writers have no
choice but to be devoid of self-respect and in all things slaves to public fancy
and the lackeys of fashion, each one attempts to go to greater lengths than
the last in pandering to the tastes of the time. They weave their brutal histor-
ical tales, string together their obscene romances, and yield to every passing
vogue. Nevertheless they find it so difficult to abandon the pretext of “en-
couraging virtue” that they stop at nothing to squeeze in a moral, thereby dis-
torting the emotion portrayed, falsifying the situations, and making the whole
plot nonsensical.23

Tsubouchi insisted that the novel must be regarded as art, to be appre-
ciated solely for its own sake. He urged that Western, and particularly
English, literature be taken as the model for a new kind of novelistic
prose writing in Japan free of didacticism and devoted to the realistic por-
trayal of human emotions (ninjd) and the actual conditions of life. Even
the supposedly enlightened authors of contemporary political novels dealt
only with stereotypical characters who were motivated by the desire to
“reward virtue and punish vice.” Writers of the new fiction must seek to
penetrate the wellsprings of individual behavior and reveal it, with candor,
in all its manifestations.

Unfortunately, Tsubouchi, although a first-rate critic, was himself
unable to produce the kind of modern novel that he so vigorously ad-
vocated. His book The Character of Present-day Students (Tdsei Shosei
Katagi), written in conjunction with The Essence of the Novel , deals with
the lives and loves of students at Tokyo Imperial University in the early
1880s; but, despite Tsubouchi’s efforts to delineate the psychological
complexities of the students he was portraying, the work is very similar to
the superficial character sketches and witty books of Tokugawa authors.

Hie kind of modern novel Tsubouchi had in mind was in fact written
by his friend and disciple, Futabatei Shimei (1864-1904). Futabatei,
born in Edo the son of a samurai a few years before the Meiji Restoration,
studied Russian from 1881 until 1886 at a school for foreign languages
sponsored by the Meiji government. His extraordinary talent for lan-
guages enabled him to excel at the school and gave rise to his decision to
become a full-time translator and writer. Futabatei’s translations from the

Encounter with the West

261

Russian of such authors as Turgenev, begun in the mid-1880s, were of
prime importance in the literary history of the Meiji period; for they
were the first renderings of Western literature into Japanese that can
truly be called translations. In the free adaptations of other early and mid-
Meiji translators, large sections were often either omitted or added and
sometimes only the most essential plot of a book was retained. Begin-
ning with Futabatei, Japanese translation of the literature of the West
became a genuinely professional pursuit.

Immediately after finishing his studies at the foreign language school
in 1886, the still unknown Futabatei boldly called upon Tsubouchi to
discuss the literary matters raised by the latter in The Essence of the Novel.
Thus began a warm and lasting friendship between the two men that
provided, among other things, the conditions necessary for Futabatei to
embark upon the writing of the first modern Japanese novel, The Drift-
ing Cloud (Ukigumo), published in installments between 1887 and 1889.

The Drifting Cloud is a realistic novel, written in a colloquial style, that
has a unified and sustained plot and probes the feelings and psychologi-
cal motivations of its principal characters. It is the story of Bunzo, a gov-
ernment clerk who lives in the home of his aunt and who loves and
hopes to marry his cousin, Osei. As the story opens, Bunzo has lost his
job, much to the disgust of the aunt, who has never been particularly
fond of him and is now convinced that he is a failure. Bunzo’s apparent
inability to get ahead in a generation of Japanese striving madly to
achieve the fame and fortune promised by modernity stands in sharp
contrast to the prospects of Noboru, a colleague who has received a pro-
motion just as Bunzd is fired. Clearly, Noboru is the new Meiji man,
while Bunzo is a pathetic example of those who inevitably fall the vic-
tims of progress. When Noboru visits the aunt’s home, he predictably
causes new difficulties, for the aunt sees in him the ideal match for her
daughter, and Osei herself, a flighty and superficial person, responds by
rejecting Bunzo and entering into a flirtation with Noboru. Unfortu-
nately, Futabatei’s handling of the later stages in the plot of The Drifting
Cloud is clumsy and unconvincing. The Osei-Noboru flirtation peters out
and, in the end, Bunzo, who has been immobilized by events, is encour-
aged by a mere smile from Osei to anticipate a reconciliation with her.
For all its faults, however, The Drifting Cloud remains an epochal work
that inaugurated realistic fictional writing in modern Japan.

While Tsubouchi Shoyo and Futabatei Shimei were thus taking the
pioneer steps in creating a new fiction on Western lines, other writers,
motivated in part by the strongly conservative, nativistic trend of the
1880s, sought to revitalize Japanese literature by means of its own tradi-
tion. The most influential of these writers emerged from a group called
the Ken’yusha (Society of Friends of the Inkstone), founded in 1885 by
Ozaki Koyo (1867-1903) and others, who were at the time still students

262

Encounter with the l Vest

at Tokyo Imperial University. Issuing a magazine with the facetious title
of The Literary Rubbish Bin (Garakuta Bunko) y the members of the
Ken’yusha called for a literary renaissance through rejection of the styles
of writing and themes, including the didactic and the “witty,” that had
held sway in Japan from the Bunka-Bunsei epoch earlier in the century,
and restoration of the great prose standards of Genroku, particularly as
found in the works of Saikaku.

Like the contemporary scholars of the “national essence” movement,
the Ken’yusha writers were not simply blind reactionaries. Ozaki, for
example, thoroughly agreed with Tsubouchi’s dictum (presented in The
Essence of the Novel) that literature should be regarded as an independent
art, not requiring justification on moralistic or other grounds. Ozaki be-
lieved, moreover, that the realism Tsubouchi sought in modern Western
fiction was more readily and appropriately accessible to Japanese in the
realistic writing of Saikaku. Ozaki’s own novels, written in the style of
Saikaku, were enormously popular and helped stimulate the rediscovery
of Genroku literature that we have already noted. Yet Ozaki and the other
Ken’yhsha writers, despite their appeal to readers in the 1880s and
1890s, contributed virtually nothing to the development of the modern
novel in Japan. They were almost unchallengeably powerful in the liter-
ary world of the late 1880s and early 1890s, even to the point of control-
ling many of the most important outlets for fictional publication; but,
upon the untimely death of Ozaki in 1903, their brand of “renaissance
literature” quickly gave way to other kinds of modern fictional writing
whose growth had been prefigured by the earlier work of Tsubouchi and
Futabatei.

Japanese poetry, while subject to much the same pull between tradi-
tional and modern (i.e., Western) influences that afflicted prose litera-
ture and nearly all other aspects of culture in the Meiji period, had its
own special problems. First, poetry had always been the most “serious”
of Japanese literary pursuits and hence brought an infinitely more weighty
tradition to the modern era than the slightly regarded practice of prose
writing. Second, although constricting rules of diction and vocabulary
could be broken, the special qualities of the Japanese language that so
fundamentally determined what could and could not be done poetically
(for example, rhyme could not be used as a prosodic device) prevented
Japanese poets from emulating much of Western poetry And finally, in
Japan as in the West, poetry could not hope to compete in popularity
with the novel as the dominant literary form of modernization.

To many early Meiji poets, the classical waka — or tanka (short poem),
as it has been more commonly called in modern times — was so buried in
the past that there was little sense in even trying to exhume it. And, at
any rate, both the tanka and the haiku were forms so limited in scope as
to be useless for the expression of modern ideas and sentiments. Poets

Encounter with the West

263

should instead turn their attention to the translation of Western poetry
and to the development of new kinds of verse based on Western models.
The first major step in this direction was the publication in 1882 of the
Collection of Poems in the New Style (Shintaisho) y compiled by three pro-
fessors of Tokyo Imperial University and consisting of nineteen transla-
tions from English and five original pieces by the compilers themselves.
Like the political novels of the same time, much of the poetry written in
the new style during the next few years dealt with the subjects of govern-
mental and social reform.

Meanwhile, as a result of the conservative winds that had begun
blowing forcefully by the middle and late 1880s, devotees of the older
poetic modes, and especially the tanka , were given something of a new
lease on life. The hidebound members of the traditional tanka schools,
who had continued composing as though the Meiji Restoration had not
happened, are of no particular interest to us; but other tanka poets
actively sought to reform and reinvigorate their art. Perhaps the most
noteworthy of these reformist poets (who first came to prominence dur-
ing the 1890s) was Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902), a practitioner of haiku
who did not seriously take up the tanka until about this time. Shiki was
employed as a reporter on the staff of Japan (Nihon), a magazine devoted,
like Miyake Setsurei’s The Japanese , to “preservation of the national
essence”; and it was in large part because his editors began publishing
tanka composed by members of the traditional schools as examples of a
native art worth preserving that Shiki decided to speak out on tanka
reform.

In addition to calling for freedom of poetic diction and the use of
modern language, Shiki championed the concept of shasei or “realistic
depiction.” Furthermore, he deplored the fact that the tanka , from the
time of the standard-setting tenth-century anthology Kokinshu , had
been infused with an artificiality of wit and a fragility of emotion un-
suited to the true spirit of the Japanese. Strongly endorsing the views of
the Tokugawa period scholar of National Learning, Kamo Mabuchi,
Shiki lauded the merits of the Man [ 'ydshu . He saw in the poems of this
earliest of anthologies such qualities as masculine vigor, directness of
expression, and “sincerity” (makoto) that were in particular likely to be
appreciated by his fellow countrymen in the expansive, imperialistic
mood following Japan’s startling military victory over China in 1894-95.

Much like the novelist Ozaki Koyo, Shiki tried to find realism — ap-
parently the most valued of “modern” aesthetic qualities — in the Japa-
nese literary tradition. In fact, Shiki’s advocacy of “realistic depiction”
was, as Robert Brower has observed, “a quasi-scientific principle directly
influenced by conceptions of illusionist realism in Western-style paint-
ing.”24 Here is an example of one of Shiki’s tanka in the mode of realistic
depiction that, in fact, is very much like a haiku in its poetic effect:

264

Encounter with the West

At the verandah’s edge

The tightly curled young plantain

Unfolds its leaves,

And five feet of green
Cover the wash basin.25

It appears that, with Shiki, we have still another example of the strong
impulse on the part of so many modern Japanese scholars and artists
(indeed, probably all of them during at least one phase or another of their
careers) either consciously or unconsciously to relate to their own national
past those features of modern culture that emerged in the West and that
they admire or wish to utilize. But history is cruel to this impulse, for the
unalterable fact is that the West evolved such things as modern realistic
literature first and the Japanese will never know whether they could have
done it independently.

In contrast to their relatively recent exposure to Western literature
(that is, belles-lettres), the Japanese had had a rather long historical
acquaintanceship with the visual arts, particularly painting, of the West.
Unencumbered by a language barrier, the visual arts are obviously more
amenable to cross-cultural transmission, although in the case of Japan this
in fact meant simply that the inevitable clash between Japanese tradition
and Western modernity could be precipitated even more readily and with
greater abandon than it could in literature. At the same time, as Sansom
has suggested, it is also possible that in the visual arts Japan’s aesthetic
heritage was better prepared than it was in literature to stand up against
Western intrusion.26

The Jesuits had first introduced Western visual arts to Japan in the
sixteenth century and had even trained Japanese artists in contemporary
painting techniques. But the anti-Christian measures of the Tokugawa
shogunate had, of course, eliminated this and almost all other Western
influences from the country during the mid-seventeenth century. Not
until the rise of Dutch Studies about a hundred years later did knowl-
edge of Western art again make its way into Japan. Subsequently, nearly
all of the major, vital schools of painting in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by
Western techniques. Some painters, like Shiba Kokan, went over entirely
to the foreign medium and learned to paint in precise technical imita-
tion of the Western manner. Curiously, however, the work of Kokan and
other pioneer Western-style painters seems to have fallen into obscurity,
and some artists in the last years of the Tokugawa shogunate, after Japan
had been opened by Perry, laboriously set about to learn Western paint-
ing on their own from the few foreign-language manuals they could
acquire without being aware of what Kokan and his fellow proponents of
Dutch Studies had already accomplished.

Encounter with the West

265

The most prominent person in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji
efforts to develop and popularize Western art in Japan was Kawakami
Togai (1827-81). 27 A moderately skilled artist in the bunjin or literati
style of painting, Kawakami took up the study of the Dutch language
sometime about the 1850s and soon turned his attention also to Euro-
pean painting. In 1857 he joined the shogunate’s Office for Barbarian
Studies, the organization that also employed a number of the later mem-
bers of the Meiji Six Society, and within a few years was appointed to
head its newly established section on the study of painting. After the
Restoration, Kawakami, who was primarily interested in the practical,
scientific side of Western painting, was engaged by the Ministry of Edu-
cation to develop teaching methods and prepare training manuals on art
for use in public schools. Among the innovations he sponsored was
instruction in realistic drawing with pencils, rather than painting with
the traditional Japanese ink-brush.

In 1876 the Meiji government, continuing its policy of encourage-
ment of Western-style art, opened the Industrial Art School (Kobu
Bijutsu Gakko) and invited several Italian artists to provide training in
painting, sculpture, and general methods of art. The most important of
these was Antonio Fontanesi (1818-82), who during his stay of approx-
imately two years in Japan made a profound impression on the students
he taught, several of whom became outstanding Western-style painters
in later years. So popular was Fontanesi that when he left for home in
1878, at least partly owing to a difference of opinion with his employers
in the Japanese government, a number of students withdrew from the
school and founded a society for the furtherance of Western art, thereby
inaugurating the first independent art movement of the modern era in
Japan.

Fontanesi’s departure was undoubtedly related to the beginning of a
trend in the late 1870s and 1880s away from Western art to a revival of
interest in the traditional art of Japan. Coincidentally, in the very same
year that Fontanesi left, 1878, another foreigner, the young American
Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908), arrived in Japan to begin a remarkable
career as one of the two leading figures in the great resurgence of native
art appreciation.

Fenollosa, a recent graduate of Harvard, was originally engaged to
teach philosophy at Tokyo Imperial University, but before long he be-
came an outspoken (and highly opinionated) admirer of Far Eastern, and
particularly Japanese, art. Eventually, Fenollosa evolved a grand philo-
sophical concept along the lines of “Eastern morals and Western tech-
nology,” according to which he prophesied a Hegelian-type dialectical
synthesis between the spiritual East and the material West that would
advance the world to a new cultural plane. On a more immediate and
practical level, Fenollosa, along with one of his students, Okakura Ten-

266

Encounter with the West

shin (1862-1 9 13), began to take stock of Japanese art and to advocate
ways in which it could be repopularized and perpetuated.

Traditional Japanese art and artists had unquestionably fallen on bad
times during the early Restoration period. The two leading practitioners
of the ancient Kano school of painting, for example, were reduced to
menial occupations in order to earn their livings. It was also because of
the almost total lack of interest in native work in these years that Fenol-
losa and others were able to buy up at very low prices the vast number of
art pieces that still constitute the core of many major Japanese collec-
tions in foreign museums today.

Fenollosa gave lectures to private groups in Japan extolling the glories
of Japanese art and even pronouncing it to be superior to the art of the
West. He and Okakura also founded a Society for the Appreciation of
Painting (Kangakai) and urged the Meiji government to sponsor training
in the native artistic styles. Two results of their lobbying were the dis-
continuance of the Western-oriented Industrial Art School in 1883 and
the substitution of brush painting for pencil drawing in public school art
courses. But the greatest achievement of Fenollosa and Okakura was their
role in the creation in 1889 of the government-backed Tokyo Art School
(Tokyo Bijutsu Gakko), devoted exclusively to training in Far Eastern
art. In 1886- 87, Fenollosa and Okakura had traveled to Europe to study
methods of art education and museum administration, and within a few
years after their return, Okakura became head of the Tokyo Art School.

Of these two dynamic men who led the return to Japanese art in the
1880s, Fenollosa was by far the more inflexible. A transparent Japano-
phile so far as art was concerned, he also sought to impose on others his
personal biases within the realm of Japanese art. For example, while he
admired the Kano school of painting, he viewed with distaste the literati
movement of the middle and late Tokugawa period. Largely because of
this preference on the part of a foreigner, it appears, no study of the
bunjin painters was included in the curriculum of the Tokyo Art School.

Okakura, on the other hand, was very similar in sentiment to a number
of his contemporaries who have been noted in this chapter, including the
“national essence” intellectuals, the novelist Ozaki Koyo, and the haiku-
tanka poet Masaoka Shiki. All of these men were participants in the
Japanist reaction of the 1880s and 1890s; and, although not all of them
may have succeeded very well in their aims, they mutually aspired to
revitalize Japanese culture and art by incorporating modern Western (or
“international”) elements into the native tradition and not by trying
simply to reverse the course of progress. The tragedy for most of them
was that this was no easy thing to do. A little Western “materialism”
could rapidly dissipate a lot of Eastern “spiritualism.”

In the case of the visual arts, the return to tradition led by Fenollosa
and Okakura had been too radically launched, and within a few years

Encounter with the West

267

the pendulum began to swing back to a position where both Western-
style and Japanese art could coexist in Japan in an atmosphere of relative
tranquility and equal competition. The fiery Fenollosa returned to the
United States in 1890, and paintings in the Western manner were prom-
inently displayed along with Japanese works in an industrial fair held the
same year. More important, it was about this time that a number of
highly promising artists returned from periods of study in France, Italy,
and other Western countries. Among these, the one who was to have the
greatest influence in art circles and who may rightly be regarded as the
true founder of modern Western-style art in Japan was Kuroda Seiki
(1866-1924). An Impressionist who had studied for ten years in Paris,
Kuroda caused a minor furor by publicly exhibiting a painting of a nude
for the first time in Japan (fig. 66). His influence and popularity spread
rapidly, and in 1896 he was invited to join the faculty of Okakura’s
Tokyo Art School, a clear recognition — however reluctantly given — -that
Western-style art was in Japan to stay.

Since very little specific attention has thus far been given to the devel-
opment of traditional Japanese music, some general remarks should be
made before examining the impact upon it of Western music following
the Meiji Restoration.

To a great extent Japanese music evolved through the centuries in
conjunction with — or, perhaps more precisely, as an auxiliary to — litera-
ture. This was particularly true from the medieval age on, when music
was used as an accompaniment both to plays of the no theatre and to
the recitations of itinerant storytellers, who strummed their lutelike biwa
as they chanted excerpts from such works as The Tale of the Heike.
Music, of course, also became an essential ingredient of the two major
dramatic forms of the Tokugawa period, kabuki and bunraku. Like the
earlier no , kabuki and bunraku were presentational rather than represen-
tational theatres and hence readily incorporated not only music but also
miming, stunt-performing, and, in the case of kabuki , dancing. Although
some purely instrumental, nonvocalized music was naturally performed
(perhaps most notably on the samisen and the zitherlike koto , an instru-
ment of refined taste dating from very early times), much of the music of
premodern Japan was quite clearly subordinated to lyrical singing, act-
ing, and dancing, and to the recitation of libretti that possessed inde-
pendent literary merit.

Probably the first public performance of Western music in Japan in
modern times was the playing by Perry’s naval band during its visit to
Edo in 1853. 28 And as in the case of the conversion to Western-style
clothing, it was the Japanese military that led the way in the adoption of
Western music. Military units of the early Meiji period initially formed
bands simply as part of their general reorganization along Western lines.

Fig. 66 “Morning Toilette” by Kuroda Seiki (Heibomha)

Encounter with the West

269

But before long, these army and navy bands began giving frequent public
concerts, and they became familiar fixtures at the ballroom dances and
other Western-style social affairs held at the Rokumeikan in the 1 880s.

In addition to military music, Christian church music was also prom-
inently introduced to Japan in the early Meiji period. By far the most
important form here was the Protestant hymn; and, as one authority has
pointed out, many Japanese songs of the Meiji period tended to have a
strongly “Christian” sound, just like the early nationalistic songs of mis-
sionary-influenced countries in twentieth-century Africa.29

It was in the public schools, however, that the most important mea-
sures were taken to advance knowledge and appreciation of Western
music among the Japanese, and the pioneer figure in implementing these
measures was Izawa Shuji (1851-1917). After a period of study in the
United States, Izawa was engaged by the Ministry of Education in 1879
to prepare songbooks and to plan for the teaching of music in the public
school system. Izawa ’s principal aim was to find some way of blending
traditional and Western music in order to produce a new kind of national
music for modern Japan. To accomplish this, he worked chiefly with an
American, Luther Mason of Boston, and with members of the gagaku
school of ancient court musicians. The choice of gagaku musicians as
the Japanese specialists in the composition of “blended” music is partic-
ularly interesting, since it meant that Izawa and his associates chose to
bypass the more recent and vital forms of “vulgar” music that had evolved
in the Tokugawa period and to draw instead upon the rigidly conven-
tionalized, albeit “elegant,” musical tradition of at least a millennium ear-
lier in Japanese history.

One notable product of the mixing of music in early Meiji (although
not by Izawa) was the Japanese anthem, “Kimi ga Yo” (“His Majesty’s
Reign”), composed in response to the desire to have a national song like
the Western countries. The words for “Kimi ga Yo,” taken apparently
from the tenth-century poetic anthology Kokinshu , were first put to
Western music by an English bandsman in the 1870s but were later
adapted to a melody by a gagaku musician that was in turn harmonized
and arranged for orchestra by a German, Franz Eckert.

However we may judge the efforts of Izawa to synthesize traditional
and Western music, the most important result of musical training in
public schools from his time on was to accustom successive generations
of Japanese students to Western harmonies and modes, and thus to
make possible Japanization of the classical repertoire of Western sym-
phonic and chamber music. Today, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven belong
as much to the Japanese as they do to anyone else in the world.

Since the main orchestrated styles of native Japanese music were so
closely associated with the theatre, the fate of the traditional theatrical
forms after the Meiji Restoration has quite naturally determined their

270

Encounter with the W£st

course as well. The nd theatre, a remnant of the medieval age, was anti-
quated even during the Tokugawa period and, despite the authorship of
new plays by certain contemporary writers, remains a drama engulfed in
history and aesthetic tradition to be admired primarily by connoisseurs
and by students of the classical arts. Similar patronage continues to sup-
port the bourgeois puppet theatre. After a period of great flourishing in
mid-Tokugawa times, bunraku declined steadily in popularity and, with
the coming of the modern era and new demands for realistic portrayal,
has had little hope of regaining any mass following.

Of chief theatrical interest in the early Meiji period was the develop-
ment of kabuki. Much of the success of kabuki after the Restoration was
owing to the efforts of the impresario Morita Kanya (1846-97) and the
playwright Kawatake Mokuami (1816-93). After the overthrow of the
Tokugawa regime brought to an end the many restrictions that the sho-
gunate had imposed on kabuki over the years, Morita moved his theatre
from the outlying Asakusa (formerly the Yoshiwara) region to the cen-
tral Tsukiji area of Tokyo. Built first in 1872 and reconstructed in 1878
after destruction by fire,30 Morita ’s theatre gave rise to a new era in which
kabuki enjoyed social respectability and was amenable to up-to-date,
modernizing ideas.

One step taken to advance kabuki was the production of sangiri
(“cropped hair”) plays, especially by Mokuami, that dealt with current
fashions and fads (although, apart from greater topical relevance, the san-
giri plays were structurally much like the domestic pieces — sewamono —
of traditional kabuki ). Another type of new play was the katsureki or
“living history,” created after the rise of the people’s rights movement in
the 1870s. In the politically conscious atmosphere of the times, these
plays represented an effort to stage realistic historical drama rather than
the fancifully distorted quasi-history of earlier kabuki.

An even more significant innovation to emerge from the political fer-
ment of the second and third decades of the Meiji period was shimpa or
the “new school” of theatre, whose founders were actual participants in
the political party movement. Chief among them was Kawakami Otojiro
(1864-191 1), a former kabuki actor and fervid political liberal of the day.
Using current events and material from recently written political novels
(including the Strange Encounters of Elegant Females discussed above),
Kawakami attempted to present plays of topical interest, which he fur-
ther enlivened with special sound and lighting effects. The war with China
in the mid- 1890s provided a particularly fine opportunity for Kawa-
kami, who was able to capitalize on heightened patriotic feelings by stag-
ing shimpa extravaganzas dealing with the fighting then in progress on
the continent.

The Fruits of Modernity

Japan went to war with China in 1894-95 over the issue, to put it
euphemistically, of Korean independence. Korea had traditionally been
tributary to China, a relationship that gave the Chinese a kind of protec-
torate over the foreign affairs of the peninsular, “hermit” kingdom. Victo-
rious in 1895, Japan received, among other rewards, the colonial posses-
sions of Taiwan and the Pescadore Islands. Moreover, by fully exposing
the weakness and ineptitude of the Manchu government, it helped pre-
cipitate an odious round of concession grabbing by the powers in China
during the late 1890s that has been described as “the carving of the
melon.” The country that took the largest slice of the melon was Russia,
whose increasing assertiveness from this time on in northeast Asia led to
a serious clash of interests and, finally, war with Japan. In its surprising
triumph over Russia in 1904-5, Japan not only extended its empire
through acquisition of the Liaotung Peninsula and Korea (formally
annexed in 1910) but also vaulted into the ranks of the world powers.
Thus, within a half-century, the “Meiji miracle” of modernization — made
indubitable by the fine criterion of Japan’s proven capacity to beat other
major countries in war — had been spectacularly accomplished.

In the year Japan went to war with China, 1894, it also secured revision
(effective in 1899) of its unequal treaties with the Western nations,
thereby achieving a foreign policy goal that had become a national ob-
session. This achievement, along with Japan’s many other advances in
modern technology and the spectacular military victories that were soon
forthcoming over China, fostered a universal sense of pride among the
Japanese people. Despite the growing differences of opinion among intel-
lectuals and government leaders (discussed in the last chapter) about
methods of modernization and the cultural values proper to it, the Japa-
nese were still capable in the mid- 1890s of a remarkable unanimity of
attitude toward national goals. No one, for example, vocally opposed the
Chinese war; on the contrary, virtually all Japanese who spoke out pub-
licly extolled its glories. That candid old Westernizer, Fukuzawa Yukichi,
observed, for example, that one thing Westerners “ [never] expected, thirty
or forty years ago, was the establishment of Japan’s imperial prestige in a

272

The Fruits of Modernity

great war. . . . When I think of our marvelous fortune, I feel as though in
a dream and can only weep tears of joy.” And Tokutomi Soho, carried
away with national pride, proclaimed, “Now we are no longer ashamed
to stand before the world as Japanese. . . . Before, we did not know our-
selves, and the world did not yet know us. But now that we have tested
our strength, we know ourselves and we are known by the world. More-
over, we know we are known by the world.”1

Even the devout Christian Uchimura Kanzo called the war a righteous
undertaking. It seemed, indeed, to be almost a logical necessity for Japan,
having become civilized and enlightened, to assume the responsibility for
spreading the fruits of modernity to the still backward-thinking peoples
elsewhere in East Asia.

One somber result of the Sino-Japanese War was China’s further de-
cline as a source of higher culture in Japanese eyes. Although the Meiji
Restoration had rather abruptly shifted Japan’s attention from China to
the West as its chief foreign mentor, China’s traditional prestige was still
very high in Japan in the early 1 890s, especially among many members
of the conservative “national essence” movement. But the rhetoric of war-
time propaganda, combined with growing contempt for Chinese ineffec-
tuality in the field of battle, led most Japanese intellectuals and leaders
to give less and less consideration to their millennia-old cultural ties to
China. In the years following the war, some Japanese even conceived of
a modern Japan benignly repaying its cultural debt to a decrepit China by
aiding Chinese reformists and revolutionaries in their struggle against the
alien and antiquated Manchu dynasty.

At the same time, the almost joyful unanimity of attitude with which
the Japanese had entered the war with China was shattered in its after-
math. The “triple intervention” in 1896 of Russia, France, and Germany,
forcing Japan to retrocede to China one of its main territorial booties
from the recent fighting, the Liaotung Peninsula,2 incensed many Japa-
nese and made them more aggressively nationalistic than before. Other
Japanese, appalled by the ugly spectacle of concession grabbing that soon
ensued in China, recanted their previous endorsement of war as a valid
tool for civilizing and enlightening and became in varying degrees paci-
fistic. Observing, in addition, the factory layoffs and other economic dis-
locations and hardships that followed in the wake of the war, some of the
latter also came to reject the capitalistic system of economic moderniza-
tion that was evolving in Japan and espoused the doctrines of socialism.

It was thus in the period following the war with China that Japan was
first truly exposed to those harsh ideological divisions of viewpoint that
seem inevitably to accompany modernization. Yet, for better or worse in
the long run, Japan as it entered this early phase of empire building was
spared much actual divisiveness by the authority of the oligarchs, who con-
tinued to hold a uniquely superior position within the Meiji government.

The Fruits of Modernity

273

The process by which the advocates of political parties gradually ac-
quired power after the opening of the first Diet in 1890 can only be
briefly sketched here. In the beginning, they could do little more than
seek to harass the oligarchs by adopting obstructionist tactics. Not until
after the turn of the century were the party people regularly taken into
cabinets; and not until 1918 was a true party leader made prime minister.
By then, most of the great Meiji leaders were dead and those few still
alive, like Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922) of Choshu who, along with I to
Hirobumi, had been the most powerful of the oligarchs, enjoyed only a
fraction of their former influence.

Scholars continue to debate whether the kind of party government that
had evolved in Japan by the 1920s, ostensibly resembling in its major
features the British political system, was or was not democratic. Even if
regarded as democratic, the pre- World War II form of party government
was certainly extremely fragile, as was demonstrated by the relative ease
with which it was crushed by the militarists in the early 1930s. Recent
studies by Western scholars strongly suggest that, whatever else it may
have been, “Taisho democracy”3 was not populistic. In order to secure a
measure of power from the Meiji oligarchs, the party leaders adopted
what has been called the politics of compromise. In other words, they
worked much harder at establishing a modus operandi with the oligarchs
and other leading bureaucrats than at gaining popular support among the
masses. By 1925, when universal manhood suffrage was finally adopted in
Japan, there were two major parties. Both naturally sought to secure as
large majorities in elections as possible; but there was in fact very little
philosophical difference between them, and few if any party leaders were
ever really motivated to “take the issues to the people.” They were the
members of a new kind of ruling elite who stood at the top of a still highly
structured and even traditionalistic society, and in many ways they ap-
peared as remote and unapproachable to the common man as rulers
always had in Japan.

Although the socialist and other left-wing movements had very little
practical success in the period before World War II, they constitute an
important subject of study not only for an understanding of the origins
of the left wing in Japan today but also because they have, quite under-
standably, always exerted a powerful influence on Japanese writers, artists,
and intellectuals in general. One reason for the left wing’s poor showing
in the prewar period was the frequent governmental suppression to which
it was subjected. For example, the first Socialist Party, founded in 1901,
was banned on the very day that it declared its existence. Such treatment
by the authorities soon led some socialist leaders to despair of ever achiev-
ing their goals by parliamentary means and to embrace more radical ide-
ologies, such as syndicalism and anarchism. Interestingly, the split that
occurred about the time of the Russo-Japanese War between those social-

274

The Fruits of Modernity

ists who wished to continue their efforts to reform society from within
and those who increasingly rejected legal, parliamentary tactics coincided
roughly with the division between the Christians and non-Christians
among them. By and large, the Christian socialists of this period, most
of whom were fortified by the strong sense of moral purpose imparted by
Protestant missionaries and teachers of the late nineteenth century, were
unwilling to adopt revolutionary measures, but remained convinced that
their programs could and should be implemented through the constituted
governmental structure of Japan.

Probably the single most shocking event to the Japanese before World
War II was the revelation in 1910 of an anarchist plot to assassinate the
Meiji emperor. Scores of arrests were made and twelve men, most of
whom were not actually privy to the plot, were executed. The severity of
the government’s “anti-radical” action at this time effectively stifled all
left-wing activities, and it was not until after World War I that they were
resumed.

Japan’s participation in World War I on the side of the Allies was mini-
mal; yet, as a result, it was able to enlarge its empire through the acqui-
sition both of Germany’s island possessions in the Pacific and of the
former German interests in North China. World War I also brought an
unprecedented economic boom to Japan, which took over most of the Far
Eastern markets temporarily abandoned by the European belligerents.
Many economists, in fact, judge that it was about this time that Japan
finally achieved economic modernity. However such modernity may be
defined, Japan by World War I had obviously become a capitalist state of
a highly monopolistic character. Much of the country’s industry and com-
merce was controlled by a small number of financial combines or zai-
batsu, whose managing families were plutocratically associated through
marriage and other ties with leading members of the Japanese bureau-
cracy and political parties.

The Allies claimed to have fought the war “to make the world safe for
democracy.” And although Wilsonian idealism was largely ignored by the
authors of the Versailles Treaty, who were mainly intent upon punishing
Germany and furthering their own national interests, the postwar period
was a time when Western-style democracy seemed clearly to be in the
ascendant in the world. At the same time, the successful Communist rev-
olution in Russia gave new hope to radicals and revolutionaries every-
where. Partly in response to this, and even as Taisho democracy flour-
ished, the long-dormant left wing became once again active in Japan.

Probably the leading theoretician of Taisho democracy and what it
might have been was Yoshino Sakuzo (1878-1933). An early convert to
Christianity, Yoshino studied in Europe and the United States before
assuming a full-time position in political thought on the faculty of Tokyo
Imperial University in 1913. He persuasively expressed his aspirations for

The Fruits of Modernity

275

Japanese democracy in a series of articles for the magazine Chud Koron
(Central Review )> the most famous of which was “On the Meaning of
Constitutional Government,” published in 1916.

In essence, Yoshino sought to advance the cause of liberal democracy
in Japan against oligarchic or plutocratic rule. He not only advocated uni-
versal manhood suffrage (which, as we have seen, was finally adopted in
1925) but also urged reform of the House of Peers and other appointive
bodies in order to strengthen the power of the elective House of Repre-
sentatives. Furthermore, Yoshino attempted to deal with the delicate ques-
tion of the compatibility of democracy with the kokutai concept, which
held the emperor to be theoretically the source of all state authority and
power. While expressing his personal opinion that the emperor was quite
unlikely to go against the sentiments or welfare of the people, Yoshino
sought to clarify Japan’s particular brand of democracy (within the out-
ward form of a constitutional monarchy) by suggesting that the best Japa-
nese word for “democracy” was minpon — literally, “the people are the
foundation (of the state)” — rather than the more commonly used minshu ,
“the people are sovereign.” Yet Yoshino’s idea of the people as the foun-
dation of the state, along with his frequent references to the “people’s
welfare,” also had a strongly Confucian ring to it. Traditional Confu-
cianists had always insisted that government be for the people, without
for a moment considering the moral propriety of its also being of and by
them.

In addition to the inspiration of the Russian revolution for the excep-
tionally radical-minded, specific developments in Japan during and after
World War I appeared particularly favorable to the left wing as a whole.
Zaibatsu exploitation and worsening labor conditions, for example, had
brought on large-scale and militant industrial strikes in the cities, while in
the countryside, where social conditions were little better than they had
been before the Meiji Restoration, absentee landlordism had reached
nearly the 50 percent level. Moreover, the return of the European powers
to competition for the Far Eastern markets, combined with poor govern-
mental planning, precipitated a sharp recession in the postwar period.
The fall of silk prices was particularly distressing to farming families,
many of which were greatly dependent on supplementary income from
sericulture to make ends meet.

The reasons why, despite seemingly propitious conditions, the social-
ists and others on the left were able to achieve so little in practical terms
following World War I deserve more attention than can be given here.
But, for one thing, the structure of Japanese society was not conducive
to their activities. The majority of Japanese were still farmers engaged in
family-oriented, intensive agriculture and were highly conservative in out-
look. Reverence for the emperor, and thus for the established order, was
particularly strong among them. Even in the urban, industrial sector of

276

The Fruits of Modernity

the economy, many workers were held in paternalistic thrall by their em-
ployers and were simply not as socially and politically incitable as the
members of a truly alienated proletariat. Despite occasional outbursts of
anguish in such forms as strikes and riots over rises in the price of rice,
the great staple of food consumption, both peasants and industrial
workers by and large accepted their subordinate positions in life and
obeyed the ostensibly unassailable authority of those above them.

This is not to suggest that the masses of prewar Japan were merely
ignorant and docile. They were, in fact, almost universally literate,
although their moral education, as we have seen, was heavily weighted in
favor of the traditionalistic kokutai values. And any apparent docility was,
I believe, actually a manifestation of how little revolutionary potential
there was in prewar Japanese society. If the people were to be spurred
into collective action, the appeal would have to come from the national-
istic, emperor-revering right and not from the left wing, which was pri-
marily internationalist in outlook and opposed in particular to those elitist
privileges protected by the kokutai ideology.

We observed in the last chapter that the most powerful literary force
in the late 1880s and early 1890s was the group of Ken’yusha (Society
of Friends of the Inkstone) novelists centered about Ozaki Koyo, who
believed that modern, realistic writing in Japanese should be modeled on
the Genroku style of Saikaku. Although Ozaki and his companions re-
mained popular favorites among the reading public through much of the
1890s, as Japan entered its age of parliamentary government and impe-
rialist expansion, their prominence served largely to obscure the great
diversity of creative activity and ferment of ideas among other writers in
the literary world during this decade.

The danger in any survey of Japanese literature from the 1 890s on is
the temptation to classify writers according to various schools, such as the
romantic and the naturalist, and thereby not only fail to do justice to the
individuality of major authors but also give the impression of a more
orderly progression of literary trends than actually occurred. In literature,
as in other cultural and intellectual pursuits, the achievement of moder-
nity by Japan at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of
the twentieth brought with it a complexity of outlook and activity that
defies precise categorization. Even though it is helpful to apply labels to
certain groups of writers because of important characteristics they shared,
such labels should not be interpreted as fixed pronouncements on their
places in modern Japanese literature.

One characteristic manifested by virtually all Japanese authors from
Tsubouchi until at least the end of the Meiji period was their desire to
describe man and his behavior as accurately and truthfully as possible.
In this sense, all presumably regarded themselves as “realistic” writers,

The Fruits of Modernity

277

although obviously they differed greatly in their conceptions of what con-
stituted realistic writing. Certain authors of the 1890s, often loosely called
romantics, insisted, for example, that an accurate and truthful depiction
of man could only be achieved through analyses of the psychological
motivations and feelings of individuals and not simply by portrayals of
certain types or categories of people. Behind this attitude lay the vexing
problem of individualism in modern Japan. It is significant that many of
the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal
of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World , published from
1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protes-
tant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to
the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism
embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the
interests of the individual to those of the state; and the hopes of many
intellectuals and artists that the people’s rights movement might provide
a legitimate channel for personal dissent were severely reduced, if not
entirely dashed, when, from about the time of the Sino-Japanese War,
the political parties began to abandon their strong opposition to the oli-
garchs and to pursue instead the “politics of compromise.”

The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such pre-
ponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of
filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts
for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many
modern Japanese writers. These writers have been absorbed to an
unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology,
and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have
perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale — the so-called I-
novel — as their preferred medium of expression.

Among the leading figures of late nineteenth century romanticism in
Japan was Mori Ogai (1862-1922), although his participation in this
trend constituted only one phase of a long and varied career as writer,
translator, and critic. A graduate of the medical school of Tokyo Impe-
rial University, Mori spent the period 1884—88 studying medicine in Ger-
many under the sponsorship of the Japanese army. Even after entering the
literary field upon his return to Japan, he remained an army doctor, rising
to the rank of surgeon-general before his retirement from active service in
1916.

Mori was the first major Japanese novelist to study the literature of a
Western country at its source, and not surprisingly the dominant foreign
influence on his writing was German. He produced the earliest quality
translations from German literature in the late 1880s, shortly after Futa-
batei began his translations from the Russian, and, in 1890, he published
his first novel, The Dancing Girl (Maihime). Based on Mori’s personal
experiences and labeled by him an ich Romany or I-novel, The Dancing

278

The Fruits of Modernity

Girl is the story of a Japanese student in Germany, Toyotaro, who has an
affair with a German girl but ultimately abandons her in order to return
home and accept a position in the Meiji officialdom. In some ways, Toyo-
taro represents the exact opposite of Bunzo, the pathetic hero of Futa-
batei’s The Drifting Cloud . Whereas Bunzo, a failure in the competition
to get ahead in a rapidly modernizing Japan, also finds his hope for hap-
piness in love threatened, Toyotaro rejects love for personal ambition.

Romanticism, which influenced many novelists and poets in the period
up to the Russo-Japanese War, gave way shortly thereafter to the more
clearly identifiable movement of naturalism. Stimulated in particular by
the writings of Zola and Maupassant, the naturalists took their stand on
the premise, derived from the philosophical positivism of nineteenth-cen-
tury Europe, that man and society could be portrayed with scientific
realism through careful observation and clinical recording of the most
minute, mundane aspects of human behavior. The Japanese naturalist
writers have been strongly criticized, however, for at least two major
reasons: first, unlike the European naturalists, they concentrated almost
entirely on the individual and made little attempt to relate him to the
larger concerns of society; and second, by relying heavily on their own
personal experiences to describe life as it really is, they were guilty of
immense egoism. Yet, however much they may be criticized for their
approach and methods, the naturalists certainly addressed with vigor the
theme that has held greatest fascination for modern Japanese novelists:
the innermost psychological and emotional life of the individual.

The Broken Commandment (Hakai) of Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943),
published in 1 906, is generally regarded as the first naturalistic novel in
Japan. Shimazaki, a convert to Christianity, had earlier been a contributor
of romantic poetry to Bungakukai , and his emergence as a pioneer
novelist of the naturalist school suggests that, despite the great differences
between the two movements in the context of their historical development
in Europe, romanticism and naturalism tended to merge in Japan, par-
ticularly in their mutually intense, egocentric concern with the individual.
The Broken Commandment tells of Ushimatsu, a member of Japan’s pariah
class of eta , who has vowed to his father that he will never reveal his class
origins. Even after he completes school and becomes a teacher, Ushi-
matsu maintains the secret in spite of a growing feeling of guilt that he
should speak out and join others who are struggling to achieve social
equality for the eta. In the end, Ushimatsu decides to reveal his identity;
but, rather than join the fight for minority rights in Japan, he accepts the
offer of a job on a ranch in Texas owned by another, expatriate eta. Unlike
most other naturalistic novels, The Broken Commandment deals with a
significant social problem, although any message that might be derived
from Shimazaki ’s handling of it is largely vitiated by the improbable end-
ing he has contrived.

The Fruits of Modernity

279

Tayama Katai (1871-1930) was the second major writer of the natu-
ralist school, and his 1907 novel The Quilt (Futon) was the earliest purely
autobiographical work of the I-novel genre. Dealing with the unhappy
love affair between a novelist and his young female pupil, The Quilt was
for its time an especially daring revelation of the intimate relations be-
tween a man and a woman. To Tayama, personal confession was the most
scientifically valid and “sincere” of literary techniques; and in his consci-
entious application of it throughout his career he, more than any other
novelist, epitomized the real spirit of Japanese naturalism.

Although other authors began to react against naturalism shortly after
it was established and popularized as a movement by Shimazaki and
Tayama in the years immediately following the Russo-Japanese War, they
in fact shared with the naturalists the important common desire to be free
of the restraints of imposed moralism in Japanese society and to investi-
gate at their will the sources of human behavior. One group of these
authors, including Nagai Kafu (1879-1959) and his disciple Tanizaki
Junichiro (1886-1965), became known as “aesthetes” or “decadents.”
Whereas the naturalists proclaimed a scientific interest in all aspects of
life, no matter how trifling, such aesthetes as Kafu and Tanizaki were ex-
pressly concerned with the more unwholesome, hedonistic, and even
bizarre patterns of conduct observable in man.

Nagai Kafu spent the years 1903-8 in the United States and France.
His chief reaction to the United States seems to have been a mild distaste
for the materialistic character of American life as he saw it. In France,
on the other hand, the pleasures of Parisian life only intensified the sen-
timent that was to be the most persistent in Kafu’s writings: nostalgia for
the gracious and aesthetically cultivated ways of the past.

Back in Japan, Kafu’s natural habitat was the demimonde and his
guiding urge was to recapture what he could of the former life style of
the floating world of Edo. Like the other Japanese aesthetes, he was pre-
occupied with women— especially the samw^tt-playing geisha type — and
with the voluptuous delights they could provide. Ever nostalgic and sen-
sual, Kafu appears constantly to have sought escape from the realities of
modern Japanese society. Although he privately expressed outraged shock
at the severity of governmental suppression of the anarchists accused in
1910 of plotting against the life of the Meiji emperor, it is doubtful that
his escapism stemmed from any deeply felt despair over the restriction
of personal freedoms in Japan. Rather, Kafu was drawn by temperament
to seek his ideals and pursue his fantasies in the past. As Edward Seiden-
sticker has put it: “Buildings had to be decaying, cultures ill and dying, if
not dead, before he could really like them.”4

One of Kafu’s loveliest tributes to the disappearing world of old Tokyo
is the elegiac novelette The River Sumida [Sumidagaway 1909). This is the
story of Chokichi, a boy growing up. To Kafu, growing up was by its

280

The Fruits of Modernity

nature sad because it could be accomplished only with the passage of
time. Chokichi’s great sorrow during the passing of his youth is the loss
of his sweetheart, who is sold — not entirely against her will — into the life
of a geisha. Chokichi himself yearns to become an actor in the classical
kabuki theatre and to re-create in life the fantasies of the traditional tales
of the past. Here is a passage that movingly evokes not only the intensity
of Chokichi’s yearning but also Kafu’s own peculiar sensitivity to the city
that absorbed all of his affection:

Chokichi noticed by chance on one of the houses of the neighborhood a sign
with the name of the street. He recalled at once that this was the very street
mentioned in The Calendar of Plum Blossoms, which he had avidly read not
long before. Ah, he sighed, did those ill-starred lovers live in such a dark, sin-
ister street? Some of the houses had bamboo fences exactly like the ones in
the illustrations to the book. The bamboo was withered and the stalks were
eaten at the base by insects. Chokichi thought they would probably disinte-
grate if he poked them. An emaciated willow tree dropped its branches,
barely touched with green, over the shingled roof of a gate. The geisha Yone-
hachi must have passed through just such a gate when, of a winter’s after-
noon, she secretly visited the sick Tanjiro. And it must have been in a room of
such a house that the other hero, Hanjiro, telling ghost stories one rainy
night, dared to take his sweetheart’s hand for the first time. Chokichi experi-
enced a strange fascination and sorrow. He wanted to be possessed by that
sweet, gentle, suddenly cold and indifferent fate. As the wings of his fancy
spread, the spring sky seemed bluer and wider than before. He caught from
the distance the sound of the Korean flute of a sweet-seller. To hear the flute
in this unexpected place, playing its curious low-pitched tune, produced in
him a melancholy which words could not describe.15

But Chokichi’s widowed mother (the teacher of a classical form of dra-
matic recitation) and his uncle (a haiku master) — both of whom are relics
of the past — seek to persuade him not to enter the theatre but to remain
in school. In despair, Chokichi allows his health to decline and contracts
typhoid fever. It is in this melancholy state of affairs that the book ends,
though we are given hope that the uncle will now help Chokichi to be-
come an actor. Reflecting on his own past, the uncle realizes that for Cho-
kichi, as for himself, the pursuit of one of the classical arts, such as haiku
or kabuki , is infinitely preferable to the modern alternative of entering
into a life of drudgery in business.

Tanizaki Junichiro was a far more powerful and versatile writer than
Nagai Kafu. Unlike Kafu, who was obsessed with the vanishing life of
Edo, Tanizaki produced books on a great variety of subjects. Some, for
example, are set in Japan’s distant past, while others are intimately per-
sonal accounts, often of a highly erotic nature; still others, like his master-
piece, The Makioka Sisters f are evocations of Japanese society. To many
readers, Tanizaki was the most decadent of the decadent writers, a view

The Fruits of Modernity

281

they formed from the extraordinarily masochistic, sexually perverse be-
havior of so many of his characters. Nagai Kafu’s heroes had, for the most
part, simply used women or had taken what pleasures they could from
them; but, in the writings of Tanizaki, men willingly debase and sacrifice
themselves to the glorification of feminine beauty. This is perhaps best
seen in the recurrent theme of foot fetishism. Tanizaki’s last — although by
no means best — novel, The Diary of a Mad Old Man ( Futen Rojin Nikki>
1961), deals exclusively with the passion of a sickly, withered, and impo-
tent old man for his daughter-in-law, a former cabaret girl who humors
him in return for monetary favors. The old man is particularly enamored
with the girl’s feet and even schemes to have imprints made of them on
his tombstone so that he can lie in eternal abjection beneath them.

Another central theme in Tanizaki’s work is the familiar conflict be-
tween East and West. For other Japanese, this was a conflict of philoso-
phies or of an Eastern spiritualism as set against a Western materialism;
but for Tanizaki it seems to have been primarily aesthetic. In his earlier
writings he was, as he himself later lamented, excessively infatuated with
the West and its modernity. As he approached middle age, he began to
reassess and to appreciate anew the attractions of traditional Japan. In
keeping with his ever-constant absorption with women, Tanizaki dealt
most effectively with the pull of East and West in such novels as Some
Prefer Nettles (Jade Kuu Mushiy 1928), 7 where an ostensibly Westernized
man, unhappy in his marriage and accustomed to seeking physical grat-
ification with a Eurasian prostitute, finds himself increasingly drawn to
the old-fashioned, endearing femininity of the Kyoto beauty who is his
father-in-law’s mistress. To the man, Kaname, the mistress O-hisa,
though barely beyond adolescence herself, represents the timeless tran-
quility of the past, which might well be used to dissolve the perplexities
and uncertainties of modern life. One of the current passions of the
father-in-law (referred to as the “the old man”) is the puppet theatre,
and comparison is constantly made between the “doll-like” O-hisa and
the hunraku puppets. For example, while attending the theatre with the
old man and his mistress early in the book, Kaname “looked at O-hisa.
Her face was turned a little so that the line of her cheek showed, round,
almost heavy, like that of a court beauty in a picture scroll. He com-
pared her profile with [the puppet] Koharu’s. Something about the slow,
sleepy expression made him think of the two of them as not unlike each
other.”8 Later, as Kaname’s marriage continues to deteriorate, he is in-
vited by the old man to join him and O-hisa on a pilgrimage to the island
of Awaji in the Inland Sea, famous for its provincial puppet theatres. The
old man is intent not only on following the pilgrims’ path and attending
the plays but also on acquiring a puppet, the product of a dying craft.
Kaname, the modern man, succumbs completely to the antique charms
of Awaji and to the equally antique ways of his companions:

282

The Fruits of Modernity

The old man had with some regret come back early from Mount Imose, the
day’s play, and he and O-hisa had spent the evening from nine to twelve
immersed in canticles and sutras. The canticle floated into Kaname’s mind
alternately with the image of O-hisa as she started out that morning, the inn-
keeper helping her into straw sandals, her wrists and ankles bound in shiny
white silk after the fashion of pilgrims. He had come along with them for one
evening, and the one evening had grown to two and then to three. Partly of
course it was the puppet plays that had kept him on, but doubtless it was
partly too his interest in the relationship between the old man and O-hisa. A
sensitive woman, a woman with ideas, can only get more troublesome and
less likable with the years. Surely, then, one does better to fall in love with the
sort of woman one can cherish as a doll. Kaname had no illusions about his
ability to imitate the old man; but still, when he thought of his own family
affairs, of that perpetual knowing countenance and of the endless disagree-
ments, the old man’s life — off to Awaji appointed like a doll on the stage,
accompanied by a doll, in search of an old doll to buy— seemed to suggest a
profound spiritual peace reached without training and without effort. If only
he could follow the old man’s example, Kaname thought.9

One of the greatest writers of the late Meiji and early Taisho periods,
who was not associated with any particular movement or school, was
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916). Soseki majored in English literature at
Tokyo Imperial University and studied in England from 1900 until 1903.
He subsequently lectured for a brief period at the university as the suc-
cessor to Lafcadio Hearn, but devoted most of his time during the re-
maining years of his life to the prolific output of novels that have earned
him the lofty position he holds in modern Japanese literature.

Natsume Soseki’s great theme was the loneliness and isolation of man,
particularly the Japanese intellectual of his age, whose society had in
recent decades rejected so much of the native tradition and taken on so
much of the scientific and industrial facade of the West that it had
plunged itself into a great spiritual abyss. It is from Soseki that we hear
the most anguished cry over the failure of “Eastern morals” to keep pace
with “Western technology” in the course of Japan’s modernization. Man
is by nature an isolated creature, yet how much more agonizing is his
ordeal of loneliness when an impersonal and alien technology has
destroyed the very fabric and continuity of his society’.

In dealing with the subject of the solitary human ego* Soseki used the
familiar confessional technique of “fictional” self-analysis so favored by
modern Japanese authors. In his finer novels, like Kokoro (1914), the im-
pact of such self-analysis is one of almost overpowering intensity. Kokoro
is a story of friendship between a youth and an older man (referred to by
the respectful Japanese title of Sensei or “Teacher”). As the friendship
between the two unfolds, we learn that some dark tragedy lies in Sensei’s
past, a tragedy that has left him with an utterly despairing, misanthropic
view of life. The second half of the book is actually a novel within a novel,

The Fruits of Modernity

283

presented in the form of a letter that Sensei writes to the youth confess-
ing the story of his past. It is the tale of a triangular love affair in which
Sensei is overwhelmed with guilt for, in his mind, having betrayed his
friend and rival and for having driven him finally to suicide. Later, how-
ever, Sensei considers the possibility that his friend (identified only as K)
had some even more desperate reason for his ghastly act than failure in
love:

I asked myself, “was it perhaps because his ideals clashed with reality that he
killed himself ?” But I could not convince myself that K had chosen death for
such a reason. Finally, I became aware of the possibility that K had experi-
enced loneliness as terrible as mine, and wishing to escape quickly from it,
had killed himself. Once more, fear gripped my heart. From then on, like a
gust of winter wind, the premonition that I was treading on the same path as
K had done would rush at me from time to time and chill me to the bone.10

In fact, Sensei does commit suicide after completing the confessional
letter to his young friend. And he does so at a time, in the year 1912, of
particular poignancy both for him and for the Japanese people:

... at the height of the summer Emperor Meiji passed away. I felt as though
the spirit of the Meiji era had begun with the Emperor and had ended with
him. I was overcome with the feeling that I and the others, who had been
brought up in that era, were now left behind to live as anachronisms.11

Even as the Meiji emperor’s funeral cortege was leaving the imperial
palace in Tokyo, the country was jolted by sensational news. General
Nogi Maresuke (1849-1912), hero of the Russo-Japanese War, had com-
mitted suicide along with his wife. What made the news sensational was
that Nogi had disemboweled himself in the ancient samurai tradition of
junshi to follow his lord (the emperor) in death. In the words of Carol
Gluck, “On first hearing it did not seem possible that one of the best-
known figures in Meiji national life had committed junshi. ... In a nation
in the midst of a solemn celebration of its modernity, its foremost sol-
dier . . . had followed a custom that had been outlawed by the Tokugawa
shogunate as antiquated in 1663.”12

To some, Nogi’s act was deserving of highest admiration as a dramatic
reminder of values of the past that may have been lost in the headlong
drive to modernize. Among the most profoundly affected was Mori Ogai,
who from this time on devoted himself chiefly to writing works that dealt
with Japanese history. And in the popular culture Nogi soon took his
place at the forefront of the pantheon of Japan’s youth heroes along with
the fourteenth-century loyalist fighter Kusunoki Masashige and the forty-
seven ronin. Some, on the other hand, regarded Nogi’s junshi as a national
humiliation that went against everything that had been achieved during
the Meiji period. To the novelist Shiga Naoya (who will be discussed

284

The Fruits of Modernity

shortly) Nogi was a “stupid fool” (baka na yatsu ).n Very likely many
Japanese were ambivalent in their feelings about Nogi. As one journalist
put it, “[W]hile emotionally we express the greatest respect [for General
Nogi], rationally we regret that we cannot approve. One can only hope
that this act will not long blight the future of our national morality.”14

It should not be thought that all writers of the late Meiji and early
Taisho periods were pessimistic or skeptical about the values of a mod-
ernized Japan. On the contrary, a new group of authors, known as the
“White Birch” writers from the title of the magazine Shirakaba that they
began publishing in 1910, had already appeared on the scene to voice
cheerful and idealistic sentiments about the course of Japanese society,
sentiments that were more in keeping with the advent of Taisho democ-
racy. The White Birch writers were for the most part younger men from
excellent families; indeed, their nominal leader, Mushanokoji Saneatsu
(1885-1976), was descended from the Kyoto aristocracy. They regarded
themselves as cosmopolites whose interests were in the furtherance of
international, rather than simply national, art. Mushanokoji was another
who was singularly unimpressed with the purported significance of Nogi’s
suicide as a reaffirmation of the vital spirit that had traditionally perme-
ated Japanese life and culture.

The White Birch writers took particular exception to what they re-
garded as the excessively gloomy outlook and plodding ways of the natu-
ralists. Instead, they affirmed their own faith in the positive value of indi-
vidualism and the expectation that it would thrive in Japan as elsewhere.
They also tended to preach a Tolstoian kind of humanism, and dabbled
to varying degrees with ideas of social leveling. Mushanokoji even went
so far as to establish in Kyushu in 1919 a “new village,” whose inhabitants
were expected to live in idyllic tranquility and communal brotherhood.
But, by and large, the humanism of the White Birch writers, who were
secure in their own elitist social status, was more intellectual than prac-
tical. The most powerful advocacy of radical social change in this period
came from the group of proletarian writers who emerged in the early
1920s along with organized Marxism in Japan.

In addition to their purely literary pursuits, the White Birch writers
were active, through their organ Shirakaba , in the advancement of the
visual arts in the Western manner. This was a time of radical new art
movements in the West, ranging from Expressionism to Fauvism and
Cubism, end Japanese artists returning from study in France and else-
where in Europe duly introduced each movement to their country,
though not necessarily in any coherent order. Western-style art was by
this time firmly implanted in Japan, and even centered on an official
establishment located in the branch of the Ministry of Education re-
sponsible for the sponsorship of national art exhibitions. One of the pillars
of this establishment was Kuroda Seiki, the Impressionist-influenced

The Fruits of Modernity

285

painter who, as noted, was active in introducing Western art to Japan
during the last years of the nineteenth century. Like their contemporary
European counterparts, the establishment artists of Japan were startled
and shocked by the extreme radicalism of, for example, the Fauvist use
of raw, “barbaric” colors and the Cubist reduction of art to geometric
lines and planes, and they sought to exclude work based on such tech-
niques and principles from the national exhibitions sponsored by the
Ministry of Education. The response of the Japanese avant-garde artists
was to withdraw from affiliation with the establishment and to go their
private ways by forming societies for joint study and exhibitions.

In the history of Western art the critical transition stage between
nineteenth-century Impressionism and these radical movements that
branched into the modern art of the twentieth century was the painting
of the Post-Impressionists — Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin. These men
had recognized the limitations of Impressionism, which was concerned
primarily with optical problems and with rendering nature “as it is really
seen,” and they sought, in their own individualistic ways, new content or
meaning in art other than purely pictorial representation. Thus Cezanne’s
work led to Cubism, Van Gogh’s to Expressionism, and Gauguin’s to
various forms of Primitivism (including Fauvism).15 The Japanese avant-
garde artists and intellectuals of the early twentieth century were, in fact,
not very sensitive to the distinctions between one school or movement of
modern Western art and another. They appear to have responded more
to particular works of art and, especially in the case of the Post-Impres-
sionists, to the artists themselves. The uncompromising individualism of
men like Van Gogh and Gauguin and their willingness, for the sake of
personal ideals, to flout all artistic and social conventions profoundly im-
pressed their Japanese admirers. Such individualism — unusual in the West
and almost totally alien to the Japanese tradition — appealed particularly
to the White Birch writers, with their cosmopolitan sentiments, and was
one of the themes most vigorously promoted in essays on art that ap-
peared in Shirakaba.

A writer of major importance associated with the White Birch group
— although he really had little in common with someone like Mushano-
koji, apart from the fact that they were lifelong friends — was Shiga Naoya
(1883-1971). Shiga’s great fame rests on a rather meager literary output,
consisting mosdy of short stories and one full-length novel, A Dark Night's
Passing (An'ya Koro). 16 The latter, however, is a masterpiece, and is prob-
ably the most successful work in the Japanese category of the I-novel.

Shiga’s principal subject was invariably himself. As a well-known Japa-
nese critic has remarked: “. . . no one has adhered so scrupulously as he
has to the approach of the personal novel [shishosetsu or I-novel], in which
the logic of everyday life becomes the logic of literary creation.”17 This
idea of the logic of everyday life can be observed in A Dark Night's Pass-

286

The Fruits of Modernity

ingy which has no plot in the proper sense of the word but is simply a
narrative of several years in the life of a young writer, Kensaku. The cir-
cumstances and events of the book are not identical with those of Shiga’s
own life, but they are similar; and the personage of Kensaku, as William
Sibley discusses in his monograph The Shiga Hero , is the prototype of the
main male character in all of Shiga’s writings.

Like Shiga himself, Kensaku is not particularly intellectual. Rather,
he is a person absorbed with his emotions — with his fears, forebodings,
and fantasies. He has dark suspicions, for example, about his birth, sus-
picions that prove to be well founded when his brother informs him that
his supposed father is not his real parent; he has incestuous recollections
of his mother, who died when he was a child; and he is assailed with
anxieties when his wife, almost inadvertently, has a brief love affair with
her cousin. The anxieties over the wife’s infidelity lead to a shocking inci-
dent at a railway station. Naoko, the wife, causes them to be late for a
train, and Kensaku, his anger rising uncontrollably, charges ahead and
leaps aboard the train as it is pulling away:

. . . Naoko ran alongside the train toward the doorway where Kensaku wTas
standing. The train was moving no faster than a man walking.

“Idiot!” shouted Kensaku. “Go home!”

“But I can get on! If you take hold of my hand, I can get on without any
trouble!” She had to run faster now to keep up with the train. She looked at
Kensaku with pleading eyes.

“It’s too dangerous! Just go home!” . . .

Naoko, refusing to give up, got hold of the handrail. Half-dragged along
by the train, she at last managed to get one foot on the step, then pulled her-
self up. Just at that moment Kensaku’s free hand shot out, as in a reflex
action, and hit Naoko’s chest. She fell backward on the platform, rolled over
with the momentum, then lay still, once more face up.18

Naoko is only slightly hurt, but Kensaku is left to wonder what kind
of demon possessed him and caused him to do such a ghastly thing:

He could find no answer, except that he had had some sort of fit. That he
had done Naoko no serious physical injury was fortunate. But he dared not
contemplate what his action had done to their future relationship. 19

The Taisho period in general, and the years following World War I in
particular, witnessed the emergence of a truly mass or popular culture in
Japan. Further advances in public transportation, communication, higher
education, publishing, and journalism were among the factors that con-
tributed to the widening of opportunities, especially for middle-class
urban dwellers, to participate in a new kind of up-to-date “cultural life.”
Like much of the movement for civilization and enlightenment in the
early Meiji period, many aspects of this post-World War I pursuit of a
cultural life appear to have been little more than frivolous imitations of

The Fruits of Modernity

287

Fig. 67 Portrait of a “modern girl” (moga) of the Taisho period, by Wada Seika,
ca. 1930s (Honolulu Academy of Arts, Purchase 1994 [7544.1])

Western habits and fads. The addition of one or two rooms decorated and
furnished in the Western manner could, for example, transform a mere
house into a “cultural home.” And, while “modern girls” could be seen
strolling the Ginza with permanent waves and shortened hemlines, “mod-
ern boys” sported “all back” hairdos and dark-rimmed, Harold Lloyd
glasses (fig. 67). Even the great earthquake that wrought a holocaust of
destruction in Tokyo in 1923 ironically helped to advance the popular
culture; for in the process of the city’s reconstruction it was provided with
a greatly increased number of bars, cafes, and other places of leisure and
entertainment where the “modern” generation could meet and socialize.

Unlike the age of civilization and enlightenment, when the West rep-
resented an exciting but bewildering kind of utopia and only a relatively
few people could really partake of it, the evolution of a mass culture in
the 1920s not only affected (by definition) virtually all Japanese, but also
engendered in them a more cosmopolitan outlook and a stronger sense
of internationalism than they had ever had before. Perhaps the greatest

288

The Fruits of Modernity

spur to this newly internationalist sense was the boom in foreign sports
that occurred about this time. American baseball became the national
mania that it still is today in Japan, and such leisure sports as golf and
tennis also gained steadily in popularity. Japanese athletes, moreover, be-
came increasingly prominent in Olympic competition. The good showing
of Japanese swimmers at the Paris Olympics in 1924 even set off a round
of pool building in public schools.

Although not always used for edifying purposes, the phonograph and
the radio both contributed greatly to the new spread of culture, particu-
larly in making available for the first time to all Japanese the sounds of
Western music. Among the interi or “intelligentsia,” it became fashion-
able to discuss the merits of, say, the playing of Kreisler or the singing of
Caruso.

Literature also shared in the expanding vistas of a mass culture, and
writing in the period following World War I was notable for its diversity.
If there was any common sentiment among writers of the 1920s, it was
an even more explicit concern than before with individualism.20 For this
was the heyday of Taisho democracy and Western liberal ideology in
Japan, and many writers sincerely sought to address themselves to basic
questions about the individual in a modernist society. Yet Japanese
society itself remained highly nonindividualistic, and most writers — like
their precursors of the naturalist school— appear to have been concerned
more with individuality (kosei) than with true individualism (kojin-shugi) .
The dominant I-novel form was still primarily a means for inquiring into
the individual’s (usually the author’s own) ego and eccentricities rather
than into his relationship with society as a whole.

From early times the Japanese have shown a keen liking for tales of
the weird and macabre, and they have accumulated a rich literature of
such tales drawn from many sources, including legends of China, Bud-
dhist miracle stories, and their own native fables. In the modern era the
author who has made most important use of the genre of weird and
macabre tales is Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927). A sickly but intel-
lectually precocious youth, Akutagawa compiled a brilliant academic
record throughout a school career that led to graduation from the English
Literature department of Tokyo Imperial University in 1916. So exten-
sive was his knowledge of the literature and scholarship (especially phi-
losophy) of Japan, China, and the West that one dF his contemporaries
even declared him to be the best-read man of his generation.21 Akuta-
gawa published his first short story in a literary journal in 1914, and for
the remainder of his brief life concentrated almost exclusively on the
short-story form. A recent commentator has suggested much about Aku-
tagawa’s writing in asserting that the European artist who could best have
illustrated his stories was Aubrey Beardsley. Like Beardsley, Akutagawa
had a “superlative technique,” provided an “abundance of decorative
detail,” and had a great “love of grotesques.”22

The Fruits of Modernity

289

The fascination of Akutagawa’s handling of ancient tales as the mate-
rial for his stories lies not only in the powerful narrative style in which he
presents them but also in his exceptional ingenuity in probing the psy-
chological forces — often bizarrely surprising — that may have lain behind
the tales. Akutagawa is best known in the West as the author of Rashomon ,
which will be discussed in the next chapter in the context of Kurosawa’s
post- World War II cinematic version of the story. Here I would like to
illustrate Akutagawa’s literature with Kesa and Moritd ( Kesa to Morito ,
1918), the medieval tale of a warrior, Morito, whose passion for the al-
ready married court beauty Kesa led to the horrifying act of his unknow-
ingly murdering her.23 Akutagawa’s piece deals with the climax of the
story, in which Morito, blinded by his love, has forced Kesa to agree to
arrange things so that he can kill her husband while he sleeps at night; in
fact, Kesa herself occupies the husband’s bed and thus solves her ghastly
dilemma by allowing Morito to kill her in his stead. But Akutagawa raises
the possibility that the thoughts of the two lovers on this fateful night may
have been far different from what we might imagine:

Morito: I was driven by sheer lust. Not the regret that I’d never slept with her.
It was a coarse lust-for-lust’s sake that might have been satisfied by any
woman. A man taking a prostitute wouldn’t have been so gross.

Anyway, out of such motives I finally made love to Kesa. Or rather I
forced myself on her. And now I come back to my first question — no, there’s
no need for me to go on wondering whether or not I love her. Sometimes I
hate her. Especially when it was all over and she lay there crying ... as I
pulled her up to me she seemed more disgusting than I was. Tangled hair,
sweat-smeared make-up — everything showed her ugliness of mind and body.
If I’d been in love with her till then, that was the day love vanished forever.
Or, if I hadn’t, it was the day a new hatred entered my heart. To think that
tonight, for the sake of a woman I don’t love, I’m going to murder a man I
don’t hate! . . .

I despise the woman. I’m afraid of her. I detest her. And yet . . . perhaps
it’s because I love her.

Kesa: ... at last I yielded my corpselike body to the man — to a man I
don’t even love, a lecherous man who hates and despises me! Couldn’t I bear
the loneliness of mourning my lost beauty? Was I trying to shut it out that
delirious moment when I buried my face in his arms? Or, if not, was I myself
stirred by his kind of filthy lust? Even to think so is shameful to me! shameful!
shameful! Especially when he let me go, and my body was free again, how
loathsome I felt! . . .

On the pretext of sacrificing myself for my husband, didn’t I really want
revenge for the man’s hatred of me, for his scorn, for his blind, evil lust? Yes,
I’m sure of it. Looking into his face I lost that queer moonlight exhilaration
and my heart froze with grief. I’ll not die for my husband — I’ll die for
myself. . . .

Is that the wind? When I think all these torments will end tonight, I feel an
immense relief. Tomorrow the chilly light of dawn will fall on my headless
corpse. When he sees it, my husband — no, I don’t want to think of him. He

290

The Fruits of Modernity

loves me but I can’t return his love. I have loved only one man, and tonight
my lover will kill me. Even the lamplight is dazzling ... in this last sweet
torture.24

Akutagawa ’s suicide in 1927 by means of an overdose of sleeping pills
was one of the most sensational news events of its time. He had long suf-
fered from various physical ailments and from fits of mental depression,
and he may even have been schizophrenic. Still, the apparent care and
deliberateness with which he planned his death chillingly implied to many
people a far more profound intellectual and emotional despair. In his sui-
cide note Akutagawa referred only to a feeling of “vague anxiety,” but
others have chosen to interpret his act, on the one hand, in broadly social
terms (for example, as a protest against the moral vacuity of Taisho-
early Showa25 life) and, on the other hand, as an inevitable end result of
the predominantly negative aspect of creativity observable in so many
modern Japanese writers. If one accepts the latter thesis, Akutagawa
may be seen as setting the model for the suicides in the post- World War
II period of Dazai Osamu and Mishima Yukio.

If there was any general sense of moral vacuity in the literary world at
the time of Akutagawa’s death, one group of writers that should at least
be credited with trying to fill it was the Communist-oriented proletarians.
The Japanese Communist Party, founded in 1922, had its roots in the
radical, anarchosyndicalist branch of the socialist movement that had
sprung into notoriety in the first decade of the century and had been
crushed after the alleged 1910 plot to assassinate the Meiji emperor. We
have seen that despite ostensibly favorable conditions for the growth of
radicalism after World War I, the left wing as a whole was able to accom-
plish little in Japan. The Communist Party in particular found itself from
the start beset with great difficulties. Not the least of these was the in-
ability of its members to agree on ideological matters. Some Marxists,
for example, asserted that, because the Japanese government was a fully
bourgeois-dominated, capitalistic regime, efforts should be made to pre-
cipitate its overthrow by the proletariat. Others insisted that Japan had
still not experienced a bourgeois revolution, and that it would be neces-
sary to eliminate the many feudal elements in Japanese society7 before any
consideration could be given to a proletarian takeover. Still another crit-
ical issue of interpretation for Japanese Marxists was the role of imperial-
ism in East Asia. In his East Asian thesis, designed primarily for China,
Lenin identified imperialism as the principal enemy of Asian peoples and
called for the Communists among them to cooperate with the nationalist
movements of bourgeois democrats (for example, Chiang Kai-shek’s
Kuomintang in China) to expel foreign imperialists. But because the
Japanese were themselves by this time among the major imperialists in
East Asia, Lenin’s thesis had little applicability to their country.

The Fruits of Modernity

291

Even if there had been ideological agreement, the Communist move-
ment stood virtually no chance in prewar Japan, for popular sentiment
was hostile and the authorities were unrelentingly harsh. With the ap-
proach of the 1930s and mounting Japanese involvement in military ad-
venturism on the continent, the movement was ruthlessly destroyed.

Despite the failure of the Communist movement before World War II,
Marxism as a creed held a powerful intellectual appeal for the Japanese.
Indeed, one of its major difficulties appears to have been that it was
largely monopolized by intellectuals and was not effectively presented in
a practical, programmatic way for workers. During the late 1920s and
early 1930s, the proletarian writers formed the dominant school in liter-
ature, and though we may regard this as a commentary on the low state
of writing in general during these years, it is also proof that this school
was successful in firing the imaginations of some people with both the
Marxist doctrine that social relations can be analyzed in scientific, mate-
rial terms and the Marxist dream that a workers’ utopia lies in the future.

Kobayashi Takiji’s The Cannery Boat (. Kani Kosen , 1929) is regarded
as one of the finest works of proletarian literature, and an excerpt from it
will show the kind of crude propagandizing that inevitably emerged from
writing stimulated by such ideological zeal. The book tells of a commer-
cial craft operating in the waters off Kamchatka and commanded by a
fiendishly oppressive captain who cares nothing for the welfare and lives
of his crew. When the boat is washed ashore on Kamchatka, the crew en-
counters a group of Russians, one of whom addresses it through a Chi-
nese interpreter speaking broken Japanese:

“You, for sure, have no money.”

“That’s right.”

“You are poor men.”

“That’s right too.”

“So you proletarians. Understand?”

“Yes.”

The Russian, smiling, started to walk around. Sometimes he would stop
and look over at them.

“Rich man, he do this to you” (gripping his throat). “Rich man become
fatter and fatter” (swelling out his stomach). “You no good at all, you become
poor. Understand? Japan no good. Workers like this” (pulling a long face and
making himself look like a sick man). “Men that don’t work like this” (walk-
ing about haughtily).

The young fishermen were very amused at him. “That’s right, that’s
right,” they said and laughed.

“Workers like this. Men that don’t work like this” (repeating the same ges-
tures). “Like that no good. Workers like this!” (this time just the opposite,
swelling out his chest and walking proudly). “Men that don’t work like this!”
(looking like a decrepit beggar). “That very good. Understand? That country,
Russia. Only workers like this!” (proud). “Russia. We have no men who don’t

292

The Fruits of Modernity

work. No cunning men. No men who seize your throat. Understand? Russia

not at all terrible country. What everyone says only lies.”26

One of the most popular mediums of mass culture in the 1920s was
the motion picture. The first foreign movie was shown in Japan in 1894;
a few years later, the Japanese began making movies of their own; and by
the post- World War I period Japanese studios were producing a steady
flow of films to meet the increasing demand for them by the movie houses
that were proliferating throughout the country. The earliest commercial
movies made in Japan were little more than records on film of stage pro-
ductions of kabuki and its modern variant, shimpa. In the absence of any
innovative methods, much of the popularity of these movies with audi-
ences depended on the emotive skills of the benshi or “narrators,” who
described the stories on the screen.

Although their art appears to be little remembered by Japanese today,
the benshi of the silent-screen era were in their day regarded as major
performers, and some even achieved star status comparable to the
cinema’s leading actors. There are no analogs to the benshi in Western
cinematic history. Western film exhibitors in the early years of motion pic-
tures experimented with narrators posted near the screen, but the practice
of live narration for silent pictures never proved popular with Western
audiences.

Characterized as “poets of the dark” by one scholar of their role in the
history of Japanese film,27 the benshi were charged with explaining the
events and action of the stories of silent films and, most important, with
infusing the films with emotion to “bring them alive.” A great benshi
could, in the language of the theatre, upstage the film itself, attracting
audiences that were more intent upon hearing him than viewing the
screen.

Most of the films produced to meet the demands for mass entertain-
ment in the 1920s were, needless to say, of very little artistic merit; a
great many were of the bombastic chambara or samurai “swordplay” type,
the equivalent of the stereotyped American Western. Still, some people
sought to do original work and became pioneers in a tradition of serious
filmmaking that has earned much international recognition in recent
years, particularly for the way in which Japanese directors have used the
motion picture as a means to express their native, highly refined aes-
thetic tastes.

The most fundamental characteristic of the cinema is, of course, its
visuality, and the history of film is to a great extent the story of how
directors evolved methods for exploiting to the fullest the unrelentingly
realistic “eye of the camera.” For the Japanese, with their exceptional sen-
sitivity to nature and to the life of man ivithin rather than against it, the

The Fruits of Modernity

293

cinema proved to be a uniquely congenial artistic medium. This is no-
where more apparent than in the early use of film by Japanese directors
for the purpose of social observation in the shomin-geki (popular, or home,
dramas) that deal with the everyday lives of ordinary, typically lower
middle-class people. Unlike most other audiences, which would not
regard such lives as interesting unless they were enmeshed in significantly
dramatic happenings, the Japanese appear to be fascinated simply with
the pulse and movement of the lives themselves. There need not be great
crises; it is enough for the Japanese taste to be shown how people truly
behave together, most characteristically within the context of family rela-
tions. This theme of the home drama will be more fully discussed in the
next chapter along with the films of Ozu Yasujiro, its finest master. But
we can see here how ideally suited the cinema, rather than the stage, is
to the presentation of the shomin~geki . For the shomin-geki is above all a
form of drama about people’s lives unfolding within their natural settings,
settings that the stage cannot adequately reproduce. Ozu’s films have
been criticized by some Westerners as overlong and boring. Yet it is pre-
cisely the leisurely, unhurried survey of things that appeals most to his
Japanese audiences, making them feel they are seeing life as it really is
and not merely in disjointed glimpses. Time passes, the seasons change,
there is a minimum of struggle: herein lies the essence of life.28

In contrast to the flourishing of motion pictures in Japan, efforts from
the early years of the twentieth century to establish a modern Japanese
theatre or drama (shingeki) achieved nothing comparable to the great dis-
tinction and commercial success of contemporary theatre in the West.
The two main streams of the shingeki movement date from the founding
in 1906 of the Literary Association (Bungei Kyokai), one of whose orga-
nizers was the novelist and critic Tsubouchi Shoyo, and in 1909 of the
Liberal Theatre (Jiyu Gekijo) of Osanai Kaoru (1881-1928). Tsubouchi
regarded shingeki as part of the overall attempt made from at least mid-
Meiji times on to reform Japanese literature and theatre in general, and
is remembered, in this phase of his career, primarily for his experiments
in combining scenes from Shakespeare on the same programs with kabuki
plays. Osanai and his supporters, on the other hand, completely rejected
traditional Japanese theatrical forms, with their characteristic mixture of
music, dance, and acting, in favor of the representational, essentially
"spoken” theatre of the modern West. As one scholar has observed:

The enthusiastic followers of Osanai, who eventually assumed almost exclu-
sive leadership in the shingeki world of the following decades, considered
Shakespeare and the Western classics before Ibsen at the same level as no and
kabuki ‘ They considered these to belong to a world without any connection
with the vital problems of modern man — a world where dance, music, the

294

The Fruits of Modernity

stylization and professionalism of the actors could provide entertainment on
a commercial basis for nonintellectuals, but not the discussion and the mes-
sage of a new world to come needed by intellectuals for a rapid moderniza-
tion of the country.24

Osanai and the avant-garde of shingeki fervently subscribed to the lit-
erary movement of naturalism, which was at its peak of popularity in
Japan when they began their activities and which, they believed, would
enable them to reproduce life as it was actually lived with almost scien-
tific accuracy. The novelist Tanizaki Junichiro, himself an antinaturalist,
made this observation about the naturalist boom of the time: “the tyranny
of Naturalism was so fierce . . . that any common hack could obtain lit-
erary recognition just so long as he wrote a naturalism story.”50 And one
shingeki actor said that naturalism meant so much to him and his fellow
performers that they were prepared to die for it,31

To Osanai, naturalism was equatable with modernism, and in his over-
riding desire to break with the theatrical past of Japan he called upon the
people of shingeki to “ignore tradition” and devote themselves to the natu-
ralist (that is, modernist) theatre of the West. He even suggested that the
Japanese, at least for the time being, give their attention entirely to trans-
lating and producing contemporary Western plays, especially those of
Ibsen, Chekhov, and Gorki. Above all, it was Ibsen who became the god
of Osanai’s shingeki; and at meetings of a club devoted to the study of
Ibsenian theatre, the members, we are told, proclaimed that for the “love
of Ibsen, even Shakespeare was [to be] dismissed as a block-head.”32

In addition to the efforts of Osanai and others to develop a modern,
legitimate theatre, the early twentieth century also witnessed steps taken
to bring modern musical theatre and opera to Japan.33 The first Western
opera staged in Japan was Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice , performed at Tokyo’s
Imperial Theatre in 1911. Shortly thereafter, the Italian choreographer
Giovanni Vittorio Rosi was hired to help promote opera for Japanese
audiences. But his efforts and the efforts of others ran into a steady
stream of difficulties, one of the most serious of which was the lack of
good, trained voices. For a while, a group of companies known as the
Asakusa Operas (because they centered their activities in the Asakusa
amusement quarter of Tokyo) enjoyed success in presenting operas that
were rewritten and reshaped to appeal to Japanese tastes. But the com-
panies’ fortunes waned in the 1920s as audiences became more knowl-
edgeable about Western music (thanks in large part to the beginning of
radio broadcasting) and also had greater opportunity to attend perfor-
mances of real opera by the Western troupes that, by then, were regu-
larly visiting Japan. The advent of “talkies,” including musicals, also
contributed to the decline of the Asakusa Operas.

Another major effort in the development of musical theatre in Japan

The Fruits of Modernity

295

was launched with the founding in 1913 of the Takarazuka Girls Opera
troupe — also called the Takarazuka Revue — by the prominent business-
man and lifelong theatre enthusiast Kobayashi Ichizo (1873-1957). In
part, the Takarazuka Revue was an effort to appeal to movements under
way in the late Meiji and early Taisho periods to advance the rights of
women and to bring women into activities that had previously been vir-
tually all male, such as the theatre. Kobayashi, who aspired to produce a
wholesome and modern musical theatre “for the people” (kokumin-geki) y
sought to blend Western music with traditional Japanese theatrical ele-
ments, drawing upon themes, for example, from The Tale of Genji and
Madame Butterfly . Some of the Takarazuka performances were modeled
on Hollywood-style musicals; others were revues that included operatic
arias, internationally popular tunes of the day, and Japanese folk songs.

At first, the Takarazuka performances were amateurish, but Kobayashi
steered the troupe toward professionalism with the establishment in 1919
of the Tokyo Music Academy to provide his girls with formal training in
singing and dancing. In the early years, the revue maintained a strong
ensemble spirit and avoided having some of its performers emerge as
stars. But in the late 1920s a star system did evolve, along with a special
eroticism in its performances reminiscent of kabuki (although centered on
women rather than men), as the Takarazuka troupe was divided into
those who played male roles (otokoyaku) and those who played female
roles (musumeyaku). The “male” performers in particular became pop-
ular stars as “beauties in men’s clothing.”34 Kobayashi wanted to bring
men into the troupe, but his attempts to do so were unsuccessful. Re-
maining all female, the Takarazuka Revue became a fixture of Japanese
theatre and continues to be popular today.

We have noted that in the field of literature Japanese naturalist writers
concerned themselves almost entirely with analysis of the individual and
failed, for the most part, to follow the lead of European naturalists by
moving also into the realm of social observation and commentary. Natu-
ralist participants in the shingeki movement, on the other hand, quickly
made society, rather than the individual, the focus of their attention, and
tended to lean strongly to the left in their social thinking. This became
especially apparent in the late 1920s and 1930s, when shingeki became
so openly “proletarian” that it eventually came under attack from the
newly emergent militaristic leaders of Japan. The relative lack of success
of shingeki before World War II may be attributed, therefore, to several
reasons: its failure to produce a significant repertoire of original plays,
its tendency to use the stage for ideological propagandizing, and the offi-
cial suppression that this propagandizing incurred.

The early and middle 1920s were a time of general tranquility in East
Asia, when the Western imperialist powers and Japan pursued cooperative

296

The Fruits of Modernity

policies in exploiting the commercial potentialities of their holdings and
interests in China. But by the end of the decade the Japanese, in partic-
ular, found their position on the continent increasingly threatened both
by Chinese nationalist aspirations and by Russian pressures from the
north. The world market crash in 1929-30 heightened demands that
Japan abandon its unproductive policy of cooperation with the Western
powers and act independently and forcefully in foreign affairs. It was the
military that spoke out most stridently for action, and in September 1931
the army provoked an incident in Manchuria (the bombing of tracks
north of Mukden, which the Japanese railway guards falsely blamed on
the Chinese) that led within a year to the founding of the puppet state of
Manchukuo and, in 1933, to Japan’s withdrawal from the League of
Nations.

As the army embarked on aggression abroad, right-wing ultranation-
alist groups in Japan — both in and out of the military — began terrorist
and putchist activities against capitalists, party leaders, and others whom
they held responsible for the country’s critical state of affairs. In tradi-
tional manner, these ultranationalists called for a Showa Restoration —
that is, destruction of the bad ministers of state and the return of power
to the emperor. The emperor himself was an exceedingly mild-mannered
man who was institutionally shielded from all but his closest aides and
advisers and who could not plausibly have assumed the real powers of
government. In fact, most of those who plotted and entered into coup
attempts against the government in the 1930s seem to have given little
thought to what should actually be done if their destructive efforts suc-
ceeded. As Professor Maruyama Masao has observed:

. . . the content of their ideology was extremely vague and abstract, being the
principle of accepting the absolute authority of the Emperor and submitting
humbly to his wishes. One of the reasons that the participants’ plans covered
only the violent stage of the operation and were not concerned with the after-
math is that their thoughts were based on the principle of the absolute
authority of the Emperor. In other words, any attempt at formulating plans of
reconstruction would be tantamount to surmising the will of the Emperor
and thus an invasion of the Imperial prerogative. This leads to the mytholog-
ical sort of optimism according to which, if only evil men could be removed
from the Court, if only the dark clouds shrouding the Emperor could be
swept away, the Imperial sun would naturally shine forth. 35

In May 1932 a group of young naval officers assassinated the prime
minister, and with dramatic swiftness the era of democratic, party govern-
ments came to an end in Japan. The two major parties continued to win
Diet elections until they were dissolved in 1 940 in the name of national
unity, but the prime ministership from 1932 on was held either directly
by military men or by bureaucrats who cooperated with them. This
marked the beginning of what the Japanese regard as the phase of fascism

The Fruits of Modernity

297

in their country that led to the Pacific War and, ultimately, to crushing
defeat in 1945. Although most Western scholars are reluctant to apply
the essentially European concept of fascism to developments in Japan
during this period, it is clear that, under the pressure of international and
domestic crises, the form of parliamentary democracy that had gradually
evolved in Japan from the mid-Meiji period disintegrated rapidly before
the rise of the military, who succeeded in establishing an oppressive
police state by the late 1930s.

The fascists in Europe were inspired by “heroic leaders” — Hitler and
Mussolini — and came to power through mass party movements that in-
truded themselves into the political systems from the outside. Japan, on
the other hand, had no Hitler or Mussolini, and the military advanced
to power not by organizing mass support for an attack on the govern-
ment but simply by replacing the parliamentarians (that is, the political
parties) as the dominant elite in the national polity. The myriad ultra-
nationalist groups that engaged in political violence during the early and
middle 1930s acted mostly in secret without popular backing and were
more of a symptom than a cause of the military’s rise.

In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to
be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that
was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emer-
gency. The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those
sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan
from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the
material tools of modernization. Such identification was made part of a
newly articulated interpretation of the orthodox creed of state (kokutai)
in a tract published in 1937 entitled Kokutai no Hongi or The Fundamental
Principles of Our National Polity:

... it can be said that both in the Occident and in our country the deadlock
of individualism has led alike to a season of ideological and social confusion
and crisis. We shall leave aside for a while the question of finding a way out of
the present deadlock, for, as far as it concerns our country, we must return to
the standpoint peculiar to our country, clarify our immortal national entity,
sweep aside everything in the way of adulation, [and] bring into being our
original condition.36

Japan was a sacred land, ruled by a godlike (though isolated and nonact-
ing) emperor. Its citizens were the members of a great family headed by
the emperor, and they were expected to serve the state with unquestion-
ing loyalty. The military, in particular, was not to be criticized, for it had
the holy mission of expanding Japanese influence abroad and it was, in
any case, answerable only to the emperor (which meant, for practical
purposes, that it was answerable to no one).

The suppression in the 1930s not only of proletarian authors and

298

The Fruits of Modernity

playwrights but even of professors with scholarly views that were deemed
incompatible with the national polity effectively muted much of the lit-
erary and academic worlds. The cause celebre in the elimination of free-
dom of expression was the attack in 1935 on Professor Minobe Tatsu-
kichi (1873-1948) and his so-called Emperor-Organ theory of the Meiji
Constitution. Years earlier, Minobe, a scholar of constitutional law at
Tokyo Imperial University, had advanced the interpretation that the em-
peror should be regarded, under the Meiji Constitution, as the highest
organ of state, an organ analogous to the head of the human body. Al-
though strongly criticized by some other scholars at the time for pre-
suming to define an emperor whose august authority was beyond defini-
tion and who should be mystically regarded as one with the state itself,
Minobe ’s theory was generally accepted in academic circles, and later he
was even honored by appointment to the House of Peers. In 1935 a
fellow member of Peers attacked Minobe in a speech in the House, claim-
ing that the Emperor-Organ theory, about which the average Japanese
knew nothing, was a grave offense against the imperial institution. The
following week Minobe, also in a speech to the House of Peers, readily
exposed his accuser’s argument as nonsensical and was warmly applauded
by the House. The matter seemed closed, but before long there arose a
ground swell of opposition to Minobe from veterans’ organizations and
other groups throughout the country. Army leaders and politicians took
the lead in demanding a “clarification of the national polity.” The issue
raged in the press throughout 1935, and by the end of the year Minobe
was formally charged with lese majeste. He resigned from the faculty of
Tokyo Imperial University and was drummed out of the House of Peers;
his books were banned and, the following year, he was wounded in an
attempt on his life.

To a great extent this era of mounting militarism, domestic suppres-
sion, and impending cataclysm was a time when most Japanese mani-
fested an intense passion for escapist entertainment that was labeled by
its critics as a conglomeration of “the erotic, the grotesque, and the non-
sensical.” Included within this category were dance halls and girlie
revues, the yo-yo, miniature golf, crossword puzzles, and mahjong. Inter-
estingly, despite growing chauvinism and xenophobia, nearly all of these
escapist entertainments were imports from the West.

An exception to the depressed state of the arts during the militarist
era was the rise to prominence of one of Japan’s finest modern novelists,
Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972), who in 1968 became the first Japa-
nese recipient of the Nobel Prize for literature. Kawabata began writing
professionally in the mid- 1920s as a member of a group of authors
known as Neoperceptionists or Neosensualists (shinkankaku-ha) , who
attacked the excessively scientific, clinical approach to literature of both
the naturalist and proletarian schools and called for a return to purely

The Fruits of Modernity

299

artistic values and emotional sensitivity in fiction writing. The Neoper-
ceptionists regarded themselves as the avant-garde movement of literary
modernism and professed an interest in all manner of contemporary
European art credos, including Dada and Surrealism. But the movement
never established a distinctive identity, and Kawabata, its most important
member, eventually located his deepest artistic wellsprings in the native
literary tradition, rather than in the essentially Western ideas of Neoper-
ceptionism.

Speaking of the native literary tradition in terms of “ haiku and waka
— those arts of suggestion and evocation, reversal and juxtaposition, so
deeply rooted in the alogical, intuitive, and ‘irrational’ sensibility of the
East,”37 Masao Miyoshi observes that Kawabata, in his novels,

just lets his language flow in time, lets it weave its own strands, almost come
what may. The “shape” of the novel is thus not architectural or sculptural,
with a totality subsuming the parts, but musical in the sense of continual
movement generated by surprise and juxtaposition, intensification and relax-
ation, and the use of various rhythms and tempos. The renga form is often
mentioned in connection with Kawabata and for good reason: it too is char-
acterized by frequent surprises along the way and only the retrospective
arrangement of the parts into a totality as they approach a possible end.38

Kawabata published his prewar masterpiece, Snow Country (Yukiguni) ,
serially between 1935 and 1937, and made further additions and revi-
sions in the early and late 1940s. Even among Japanese authors, accus-
tomed to preparing their works for serial publication in magazines and
newspapers, this is an extreme case of novel writing in fragments. Yet
Kawabata seems to have found the procedure congenial because it
allowed him to feel his way carefully with his material and provided
maximum opportunity to extend or, whenever he should wish, termi-
nate the narrative line. Snow Country is the story of a love affair between
Shimamura, a world-weary dilettante, and Komako, a geisha in a hot-
springs resort. The setting for the affair is suggested in the opening
lines: “Hie train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country. The
earth lay white under the night sky.” Shimamura is on his way to visit
Komako, and Kawabata reveals much of the man’s character with the
startling device of his reactions to reflections in the train window:

In his boredom Shimamura stared at his left hand as the forefinger bent and
unbent. Only this had seemed to have a vital and immediate memory of the
woman he was going to see. The more he tried to call up a clear picture of
her, the more his memory failed him, the farther she faded away, leaving him
nothing to catch and hold. In the midst of this uncertainty only the one hand,
and in particular the forefinger, even now seemed damp from her touch,
seemed to be pulling him back to her from afar. Taken with the strangeness
of it, he brought the hand to his face, then quickly drew a line across the
misted-over window. A woman’s eye floated up before him. He almost called

300

The Fruits of Modernity

out in his astonishment. But he had been dreaming, and when he came to
himself he saw that it was only the reflection in the window of the girl oppo-
site. Outside it was growing dark, and the lights had been turned on in the
train, transforming the window into a mirror. The mirror had been clouded
over with steam until he drew that line across it. . . .

In the depths of the mirror the evening landscape moved by, the mirror
and the reflected figures like motion pictures superimposed one on the other.
The figures and the background were unrelated, and yet the figures, trans-
parent and intangible, and the background, dim in the gathering darkness,
melted together into a sort of symbolic world not of this world. Particularly
when a light out in the mountains shone in the center of the girl’s face,
Shimamura felt his chest rise at the inexpressible beauty of it.3y

Shimamura had begun his career as a critic of Japanese dance, but
when he was urged to become actively involved in the revival of this tra-
ditional art form, he abruptly shifted his attention to Western ballet. Even
as he became an authority on the ballet, he never attended a performance,
nor did he wish to. Shimamura much preferred to fantasize than to par-
ticipate in art or even in life, for him the world of fantasy and imagination
seemed somehow to be more real than reality itself. His only clear recol-
lection of Komako lies in the tactile sensitivity of a single finger, and he
is far more enthralled in observing the girl on the train as a transparent,
almost otherworldly image superimposed on the dark landscape rushing
by the window than in looking directly at her. He is attracted to Komako
precisely because she is a geisha, a person professionally trained to evoke
fantasy worlds and a person “somehow unreal, like the woman’s face in
that evening mirror.”40

Before the international Military Tribunal in Tokyo after World War II,
the Allied prosecution charged those Japanese arrested as war criminals
with participating in a great and sustained conspiracy for world conquest,
beginning with the Manchurian incident of 1931 . Certainly the Japanese
military was guilty of much aggression in East Asia during the decade
and a half from 1931 until final defeat in 1945. But the charge that it
pursued — diabolically and step by step — a policy of virtually unlimited
foreign conquest vastly oversimplified and distorted the complexity of
international events that led Japan to war with China in 1937 and into
World War II in 1941. Japan actually blundered into the China war
when shooting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops at the
Marco Polo Bridge in northern China on July 7, 1937. Once committed
to fighting, the Japanese found themselves in a quagmire from which
there was no withdrawal without great and intolerable loss of face. Al-
though the Japanese army won battles and seized large expanses of terri-
tory, the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek simply withdrew
farther and farther into the Chinese hinterland and continued fighting. As

The Fruits oj Modernity

301

the war dragged on, it became a fearful economic drain upon Japan, and
victory became a chimera.

Far from facing the harsh reality that the China war was interminable,
Japan schemed even more grandly and in November 1938 proclaimed a
New Order in East Asia to signal that henceforth China should be re-
garded, along with Manchukuo, as an integral part of the Japanese sphere
of influence. And in 1940, when Japan moved southward in quest of oil
and other resources, the New Order was expanded into a Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Dai Toa Kyoeiken) that was aimed at draw-
ing not only Southeast Asia but also Australia and New Zealand into an
economically self-sufficient regional zone under Japan. The German vic-
tories in Europe, including the fall of France in June 1 940, buoyed the
Japanese into believing that alliance with Germany could help in achiev-
ing their goals in East Asia, and in September of that year Japan signed a
tripartite pact with the Axis powers. But alliance with Germany and
Italy proved of negligible value and had the opposite effect of stiffening
the anti-Japanese attitude of the United States. As Japan continued to
press into Southeast Asia, the United States reacted by freezing Japanese
assets in America and by joining Britain and Holland in imposing an em-
bargo on all exports to Japan.

The intractable American opposition to Japanese aggression in 1941
made Pearl Harbor all but inevitable. President Roosevelt stigmatized
December 7, 1941, as a “day that will live in infamy,” but the fact is that
the United States was simply unprepared for war in the Pacific. This un-
preparedness enabled the Japanese to score a series of spectacular victo-
ries that seemed to accomplish Japan’s dream of founding a Greater East
Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The Japanese hegemony over the western
Pacific and much of Southeast Asia was not seriously challenged for more
than a year. One reason was the time necessary for the United States to
gear itself to a full-scale war effort; another was the fact that the Allies
gave priority to the European theatre of war. But the tide turned at the
Battle of Midway, westernmost island in the Hawaiian chain, in June
1942. In one of the first naval battles in history conducted by the carrier-
based planes of fleets that never saw each other, the Americans scored a
smashing victory, sinking four Japanese aircraft carriers. After Midway,
the Japanese Navy was forced entirely onto the defensive.

By the end of 1942, after months of ferocious fighting by American
and Australian ground forces in appalling, disease-infested conditions in
the jungles of the Southwest Pacific— especially in New Guinea and the
Solomon Islands— the Allies began gradually, but inexorably, to push the
Japanese back toward their home islands. This was accomplished pri-
marily by a series of “island-hopping” invasions in the Gilbert, Marshall,
Caroline, and Mariana chains. These invasions were carried out by Amer-
ican forces employing firepower capable of annihilating the Japanese de-

302

The Fruits of Modernity

fensive positions. In many cases the Japanese chose, in fact, to fight to
the last man rather than surrender, thus inviting the Americans to engage
in annihilation. With the capture of Saipan in the Marianas in June 1944,
the United States obtained a base within striking distance of Japan. For
the next — and last — year of the war, American bombers mercilessly
pounded Japan’s cities, large and small. The ghastly results of this bomb-
ing are vividly suggested in this description of the final months of the war:

[The United States] adopted area fire-bombing by night, at relatively low
altitude for greater concentration . . . from March 9 [1945], when over three
hundred B-29s struck [Tokyo] . Sixteen square miles were burned out in one
of the very worst bombardments in history; at least eighty thousand (prob-
ably far more; nobody knows) were killed and a million made homeless.
Worse was to follow as up to eight hundred bombers pounded all the main
Japanese industrial and urban centers.41

To the Americans, led by President Roosevelt, the surprise attack on
Pearl Harbor, in which more than two thousand Americans died, was an
unspeakably dastardly act that inspired a thirst for revenge (“Remember
Pearl Harbor!”) that may account for much of the brutality with which
the United States subsequently conducted the Pacific War. To the Japa-
nese, on the other hand, there was nothing “infamous” or dastardly about
Pearl Harbor. On the contrary, they regarded it as a brilliant victory. The
Japanese public was ecstatic, and, as Donald Keene has discussed, many
prominent writers promptly and publicly expressed their great satisfaction
— in some cases their delirium of happiness — that the anticipated war had
finally begun and that Japan had delivered a devastating blow at the
enemy, identified primarily as the United States and England (the British
colony of Hong Kong and Pearl Harbor were attacked simultaneously on
December 7 or, by Japanese time, December 8). One writer, for example,
chortled, “I never thought that in this lifetime I should ever know such a
happy, thrilling, auspicious experience”; and another exclaimed, “The
war has at last begun, with a great victory. A people which believed that
its ancestors are gods has triumphed. I felt something more than mere
wonder.” Choosing the classical waka form of verse, a poet proclaimed
that “The time has come, To slaughter America and England.” And an-
other poet grandly pronounced:

Remember December eighth!

On this day the history of the world was changed.

The Anglo-Saxon powers

On this day were repulsed on Asian land and sea.

It was their Japan which repulsed them,

A tiny country in the Eastern Sea,

Nippon, the Land of the Gods
Ruled over by a living god 42

The Fruits oj Modernity

303

Although the Japanese government was pleased to report Japan’s star-
tlingly successful early victories, it concealed the defeats once they started
coming. The government, for example, proclaimed a Japanese victory at
Midway even though it was not only a defeat but, indeed, one of the
most decisive setbacks in the history of naval warfare. With the media
under its strict control, the government thus kept the Japanese public
largely in the dark about the true course of the war after Midway. But
when the systematic bombing of Japan began in late 1944, the truth
gradually became clear to everyone. A member of the air defense head-
quarters in Tokyo during that terrible time said this about the bombing:

It was the raids on the medium and smaller cities which had the worst effects
and really brought home to the people the experience of bombing and a
demoralization of faith in the outcome of the war. ... It was bad enough in
so large a city as Tokyo, but much worse in the smaller cities, where most of
the city would be wiped out. Through May and June [ 1 945] the spirit of the
people was crushed. [When the B-29s dropped warning pamphlets,] the
morale of the people sank terrifically, reaching a low point in July, at which
time there was no longer hope of victory or draw but merely the desire for
ending the war.43

Culture in the Present Age

After more than three and a half years of fighting, unconscionably pro-
longed in the last stages by the fanatical unwillingness of its rulers to rec-
ognize that further resistence was futile, Japan finally acceded to the ulti-
matum of the Allied powers from Potsdam in July 1945, and in August
surrendered unconditionally. The last agonies of the war produced, on
one side, the horror of suicidal air attacks by kamikaze pilots — who were
exhorted to re-create the glorious defense of the homeland by “divine
winds” directed against the Mongol invaders of the thirteenth century —
and, on the other side, the unspeakable holocaust of atomic destruction
in the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In an unprecedented radio broadcast on August 1 5 (August 1 4 in the
United States), the emperor informed his subjects that “the war situation
has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general
trends of the world have all turned against her interest.” In fact, Japan’s
war-making capacity had been reduced to a pitiful remnant, many of its
cities lay in charred ruins, and thousands of its citizens faced starvation.
There remained no practical alternative to surrender or, in the words of
the emperor, no alternative but “to endure the unendurable and suffer
what is insufferable.”1

Although the emperor’s forebodings proved excessively dire, one can-
not minimize the suffering the Japanese were forced to endure in the first
few years following defeat, despite the vigorous efforts of the Occupation
regime — monopolized by the United States through General Douglas
MacArthur (1880-1964) as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers
(SCAP)— to reestablish order. People were not only hungry and home-
less, they were also spiritually exhausted; jobs were scarce and in some
sectors nonexistent; inflation raged and black markets sprang up every-
where.

By contrast, GIs strolling the streets of Tokyo and elsewhere and patro-
nizing military post exchanges seemed to be blessed with undreamed of
material prosperity. The Japanese could observe this prosperity not only
among GIs in Japan but also through American movies. For once movies
became widely available again, some 38 percent of the theatres through-

Culture in the Present Age

305

out the country were devoted exclusively to the showing of films from
America in which capacity crowds saw, day after day, “the refrigerators,
cars, modern houses, highways and all the other accoutrements of the
‘Good Life.’

As in other war-torn countries, luxury commodities such as cigarettes,
chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings were coveted in Japan in
gross disproportion to their intrinsic values. Prostitution and other forms
of fraternization between GIs and Japanese girls became commonplace
and highly conspicuous. It was also a time when Americans arrogantly
believed that their civilization, if not they themselves, had been proved
superior in the modern world. To the Japanese, ever sensitive to matters
of face, the swaggering of some GIs must have seemed almost intolerably
humiliating.

Yet the Occupation was a considerable success, at least if judged by the
extraordinary cooperation between occupiers and occupied and by the
new, extremely favorable national attitude the Japanese came to hold
toward Americans and the United States. This attitude can be observed,
for example, in postwar popularity polls in which for years the Japanese
identified the United States as their favorite foreign country or the coun-
try they most admired.

The stated goals of the Occupation were to “demilitarize and democra-
tize” Japan. In the name of the former goal the country was stripped of
the overseas empire it had painstakingly acquired during the preceding
half-century; its army and navy were demobilized and its remaining war
machinery dismantled; war criminals — including former Prime Minister
(and General) Tojo Hideki (1884-1948) — were brought to trial; and mili-
tarily tainted people were extensively purged from government, business,
and other sectors of society. In keeping with MacArthur’s utopian vision
of making Japan the Switzerland of the Far East, a provision was even in-
corporated into the SCAP-imposed Constitution of 1947 that declared,
“the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the
nation. , . . The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”3

Meanwhile, the democratization phase of Occupation policy was im-
plemented in a series of sweeping political, social, and economic reforms.
Of these the most radical (and, in retrospect, probably the most lastingly
successful) was the land reform, whereby tenantry was virtually elimi-
nated through the expropriation of most absentee landholdings. Other
reforms were directed toward decentralization of the national police force
and the education system, elimination of morals training in public schools
based on the prewar kokutai ideology, encouragement of labor unions, and
dispersal of the economic combines through a process of #attw-busting.

The new Constitution, written by SCAP Headquarters and presented
to the Japanese government in 1946, was premised on the emperor's re-
nunciation of his putative divinity (after the decision not to prosecute him

306

Culture in the Present Age

as a war criminal) and on the converse assertion that the people of Japan
were now sovereign. Henceforth the emperor was to be a symbol of state,
and the state itself was to be representative of the people through a system
of responsible party government. A thoroughly Anglo-American type of
document, the Constitution dramatically reversed what SCAP regarded
as the most illiberal and oppressive features of the Meiji Consititution.
Probably most conspicuous and most in keeping with the democratizing
zeal of the Occupation authorities was the inclusion in the new Consti-
tution's provisions of an American-style Bill of Rights.

Even before promulgation of the new Constitution and its Bill of
Rights, SCAP had abolished the wartime Japanese Propaganda Ministry
and Board of Censors (although the Occupation authorities did their own
censoring) and released all political prisoners. Some of these prisoners
were Marxists who had been in jail since the late 1920s, when prewar
Communism was brutally suppressed. One concomitant to the release of
such prisoners and the guarantee of basic political freedoms was reestab-
lishment of the Japan Communist Party, which soon acquired about 10
percent of the voting electorate. Japanese intellectuals rushed with eager-
ness to the previously forbidden fruit of Marxist ideology, and during the
first decade of the postwar period, when there was a marked abandon-
ment of the more simplistic doctrines of historical determinism in the
West, Japanese scholars and other intellectuals vociferously proclaimed
that history had already progressed and would eventually turn out exactly
as Marx (and perhaps also Lenin) had said it would.

Even some of the more vocal critics of the United States and its post-
war policies agree that the early, New Deal phase of the American occu-
pation of Japan was an exceptionally progressive undertaking. But rapidly
changing world conditions in the late 1940s — the advent of the Cold War
and the fall of China to the Communists — exerted pressures that brought
policy shifts on the part of SCAP to the point where the second half of the
Occupation (from about 1948 until 1952) has been labeled a time of un-
disguised reaction or a reverse course. Clearly the revised aim of SCAP
during these years was to transform Japan from an occupied enemy coun-
try into a revitalized bastion of the Free World in its struggle to contain
the spread of Communism in Asia.

One aspect of the reverse course of the Occupation was a general relax-
ation of the ^tfifcawu-busting program in the hope of stimulating the Japa-
nese economy, which had remained largely dormant after its devastation
during the war. Although they are alleged no longer to have the potential
for regaining their prewar stranglehold on national affairs, such combines
as Mitsui and Mitsubishi certainly have in the intervening years once
again become pervasive entities in Japanese business and commerce. But
undoubtedly the single most important boost to the economy was Amer-
ican military spending in Japan during the Korean War (1950-53). Partly

Culture in the Present Age

307

because of this spending and the freedom attained through national in-
dependence when the Occupation was ended in 1952 (in accordance with
the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951), Japan was launched upon one
of the most vigorous and sustained periods of economic growth of any
country in modern history. With its gross national product expanding by
about 10 percent annually from the mid-1950s, Japan became, by the late
1960s, the third largest economic power in the world.

Despite the devastation of war and the chaos of defeat (or perhaps be-
cause of them), the postwar period brought an immediate, unprecedented
expansion in literary output. Released from the severe restrictions of war-
time controls, writers rushed to complete manuscripts and get them into
print. Newspapers and magazines, traditionally among the most impor-
tant media for the publication of literature in modern Japan, fought
fiercely to acquire the most promising manuscripts and thereby to expand
their circulations. Established writers such as Nagai Kafu, who had re-
mained silent during the war in protest against the militarists, received
fees for their stories that seemed astronomical.

The alacrity with which some Japanese perceived the potentialities for
a postwar publishing boom in all kinds of printed matter can be illustrated
by the example of the head of Seibundo Company who, after listening at
a provincial railway station to the emperor’s August 15 broadcast an-
nouncing the surrender and after purportedly shedding tears with others
gathered at the station, got the idea on the train back to Tokyo that night
of publishing a new Japanese-English dictionary. Completed and issued a
month to the day after the emperor’s speech, the dictionary, helped by a
flood of advance orders, surpassed the three-million mark in sales within
a brief period of time. Such was the demand for reading material of every
kind that primers and publishers sought frantically to obtain paper — then
very scarce — wherever it could be found, and before long there appeared
a flourishing black-market trade in this commodity, most of which seems
to have come from surplus Japanese army and navy supplies.

One especially strong demand that arose in reaction to the nationalistic
exclusivism and xenophobia of the militarist years was for new transla-
tions of Western literature, both classical and contemporary. Before the
war, Western literature in Japan had been represented chiefly by French,
English, German, and Russian writings, but owing to the United States’s
dominant role in the war and Occupation, American literature was for
the first time also comprehensively explored by the Japanese. Major
writers such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway drew the most
serious and sustained attention, while current American best-sellers about
the war, such as John Hersey’s Hiroshima and Norman Mailer’s The
Naked and the Dead , enjoyed great popularity. In addition to American
literature, the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and their philo-

308

Culture in the Present Age

sophic precursor Soren Kierkegaard attracted considerable readership
among Japanese intellectuals who, spiritually adrift, discerned a new
truth in the doctrines of Existentialism.

In assessing the native postwar literature, Japanese critics commonly
discuss it in terms of an explosion in mass communications. Referring to
a process much more dynamic than the prewar exposure to mass cul-
ture, they speak of reaching out to a truly mass audience and of a
heightened sensitivity to the need to deal with mass social problems.
Among the organizations calling for the expansion of literary horizons in
a spirit of postwar liberation and renovation was the Shin-Nihon Bun-
gakkai (Society for a New Japanese Literature). Attracting some of its
membership from the suppressed prewar movement of proletarian writers,
the society pronounced democracy to be the highest literary ideal, imply-
ing thereby a rejection of most prewar movements in literature, including
naturalism, Neoperceptionism, and even the so-called social realism of
the earlier proletarian writers.

Among the most dramatic of the authors to emerge to prominence in
the Occupation period were those loosely referred to as burai-ha or “dis-
solutes.” Profoundly influenced by the doubts, uncertainties, and sense
of crisis that had permeated their formative years as writers before and
during the war, the burai-ha , whose most famous representative was
Dazai Osamu (1909-48), viewed the world as a place of existential chaos,
distorted values, and universal hypocrisy and tried to find humanity in it
even as they drowned their anxieties in lives of debauchery and dissolute-
ness. Claiming a debt to Camus and Sartre, the burai-ha writers rose
meteorically for a brief period in postwar letters and left a legacy of
romantic self-destructiveness that continues to hold a powerful attraction
for the Japanese.

Dazai Osamu was born in 1909 into a wealthy landowning family in
northern Japan and began what proved to be an exceptionally prolific
writing career in the early 1930s. A chronically unstable person, Dazai
had already attempted suicide four times before the postwar period, in-
cluding one effort with a bar maid in which she died and he survived.
His fifth attempt, in 1948, a suicide pact by drowning with his mistress
at the time, was successful and brought his life to a pathetic end at the
age of thirty-nine.

Like the other burai-ha writers, Dazai loudly disparaged the narrow
egoism, especially of the prewar naturalist school, that constituted the
main theme of the persistent Japanese I-novel tradition. Yet Dazai himself
relied overwhelmingly on his own life experience for subject material in
his writing — many of his stories are diary-like, autobiographical accounts
—and may even be regarded as the last great I-novelist.4 The difference,
as Dazai would contend, was that, whereas the I-novelists of the naturalist
school were unremittingly self-centered, the aberrant behavior he por-

Culture in the Present Age

309

trayed with examples of his own life represented an anguished cri de coeur
against the falsity and deceit of others (if not of mankind as a whole). At
times — for example* in the following passage from No Longer Human
(Ningen Shikkoku, 1948), the story of a man who despairs of living “the
life of a human being” and who eventually descends into the abyss of
drug addiction — Dazai’s attitude is misanthropic:

Society. I felt as though even I were beginning at last to acquire some vague
notion of what it meant. It is the struggle between one individual and an-
other, a then-and-there struggle, in which the immediate triumph is every-
thing. Human beings never submit to human beings. Even slaves practice their
mean retaliations. Human beings cannot conceive of any means of survival
except in terms of a single then-and-there context. They speak of duty to
one’s country and suchlike things, but the object of their efforts is invariably
the individual, and, even once the individual’s needs have been met, again
the individual comes in. The incomprehensibility of society is the incompre-
hensibility of the individual. The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This
was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illu-
sion of the ocean called the world. I learned to behave rather aggressively,
without the endless anxious worrying I knew before, responding as it were to
the needs of the moment.5

Dazai’s most celebrated novel is The Setting Sun ( Shayo , 1947), an
account of an aristocratic family, much reduced in circumstances, in the
immediate postwar period. A widowed mother and her divorced daughter
appear to be all that is left of the family, but before long a Dazai-like
son, thought lost in the South Pacific, returns home. Addicted to drugs,
the son promptly renews the life of dissolution and self-destruction he
had charted before entering the army and in a short time commits sui-
cide, leaving a final testament — representing the kind of confessional
Dazai so much favored — in which he reveals his alternating fear of and
disgust toward the world and the personal yearning for love that actually
underlay his appalling outward conduct:

I wanted to become coarse, to be strong — no, brutal. I thought that was the
only way I could qualify myself as a “friend of the people.” Liquor was not
enough. I was perpetually prey to a terrible dizziness. That was why I had no
choice but to take to drugs. I had to forget my family. I had to oppose my
father’s blood. I had to reject my mother’s gentleness. I had to be cold to my
sister. I thought that otherwise I would not be able to secure an admission
ticket for the rooms of the people.6

The decline of Japan’s old order is a major theme in The Setting Sun ,
and the death of the mother before her son’s suicide may be interpreted
as symbolizing the fate of that order after defeat in war. But, to millions
of fervid readers, what seemed more importantly to have set was the sun
of Japan itself, and perhaps no other novel of the period so effectively

310

Culture in the Present Age

evokes the sense of spiritual disintegration that engulfed the Japanese at
the war’s end. Only through the character of the sister, Kazuko (the
book’s narrator), does Dazai suggest a glimmer of hope for the future.
Determined to have a child by a tubercular, drunken artist friend of her
brother’s, Kazuko proclaims with a ferocity of will totally lacking in Dazai
himself:

I must go on living. And, though it may be childish of me, I can’t go on in
simple compliance. From now on I must struggle with the world. I thought
Mother might well be the last of those who can end their lives beautifully and
sadly, struggling with no one, neither hating nor betraying anyone. In the
world to come there will be no room for such people. The dying are beauti-
ful, but to live, to survive — those things somehow seem hideous and contam-
inated with blood. I curled myself on the floor and tried to twist my body into
the posture, as I remembered it, of a pregnant snake digging a hole. But there
was something to which I could not resign myself. Call it low-minded of me,
if you will, I must survive and struggle with the world in order to accomplish
my desires. Now that it was clear that Mother would soon die, my romanti-
cism and sentimentality were gradually vanishing, and I felt as though I were
turning into a calculating, unprincipled creature.7

If the burai-ha writers represented an extreme of overreaction to the
social devastation of defeat and occupation, some of the more noted
authors from the prewar period, at the other extreme, began writing
again after the war almost as though nothing had happened. For example,
Nagai Kafu, though distinctive for having remained silent while so many
other writers spoke out to one degree or another in favor of the war,
began immediately to publish the same kind of pleasure-quarter stories
he had always favored. To the apure (apres-guerre) generation of writers,
the most infuriating symbol of continuity with the outmoded literary past
was Shiga Naoya. As we saw in the last chapter, Shiga was associated
with the patrician White Birch school of writers who made their debut
about 1910, and devoted himself as a writer to a minute analysis and re-
analysis of his emotional life and psyche and of his relations with his
father, his wife, and others close to him. There was no one else who con-
tinued to be so thoroughly naturalistic — and thus, according to his critics,
so egoistical — in his approach to writing as Shiga, and when he had the
temerity to express his distaste for the work of one of the darlings of the
new age, Dazai Osamu, the latter insultingly denounced him: “A certain
Literary Master feigns distaste for my writings. But what of this Literary
Master’s own writings? Do they presume to impart 'truth’? What do they
claim to be?”8

Other famous writers who flourished once more in the postwar period
were Tanizaki Junichiro and Kawabata Yasunari. Tanizaki had begun to
publish The Makioka Sisters serially during the war but was forced to stop
by the military authorities, and publication was completed after the war.

Culture in the Present Age

311

The Makioka Sisters is the story of the decline of a once affluent merchant
house as revealed in the lives of four sisters after the death of their father,
the head of the family. Perhaps Japan’s finest modern novel, the book is
exceptional because of its considerable length and its plot construction.
Most Japanese novels are quite short and structurally loose; many so-
called novels are really novellas. This appears to reflect, on the one hand,
the native taste for the suggestive instead of the fully delineative — the
“art of silence,” as one authority9 has put it — and, on the other hand, the
classical tradition whereby the author of prose tended to write episodi-
cally and to devote much more care to the transitional elements or pas-
sages in a work than to its overall structure. The reader of The Makioka
Sisters is drawn into a highly complex and detailed narrative of the inter-
woven lives of the sisters as they seek collectively to find a proper husband
for one, to deal with the independent and headstrong ways of another,
and above all to grapple with the vicissitudes that have so altered their
lives since their father’s death. Although Tanizaki informs us only in pass-
ing that the time is the advent of the China war in the late 1930s, the
reader is absorbed with a powerful sense — intensified by his own knowl-
edge of the coming of World War II — that he is witnessing the decline
not only of a single family but of the entire way of life of prewar Japan.

This sense of decline is intense, for example, in the passage where
Sachiko, the second sister and central figure in the novel, visits her elder
sister as she is about to move out of the main family residence in Osaka.
With the dwindling of the Makioka family business, the elder sister’s hus-
band— the titular head of the family — had returned to his former position
in a bank. The bank has transferred him to Tokyo, and the Osaka house
must be sold:

The house was built in the old Osaka fashion. Inside the high garden walls,
one came upon the latticed front of the house. An earthen passage led from
the entrance through to the rear. In the rooms, lighted even at noon by but a
dim light from the courtyard, hemlock pillars, rubbed to a fine polish, gave
off a soft glow. Sachiko did not know how old the house was — possibly a
generation or two. At first it must have been used as a villa to which elderly
Makiokas might retire, or in which junior branches of the family might live.
Not long before his death, Sachiko’s father had moved his family there from
Semba; it had become the fashion for merchant families to have residences
away from their shops. The younger sisters had therefore not lived in the
house long. They had often visited relatives there even when they were
young, however, and it was there that their father had died. They were deeply
attached to the old place. Sachiko sensed that much of her sister’s love for
Osaka was in fact love for the house, and, for all her amusement at these old-
fashioned ways, she felt a twinge of pain herself — she would no longer be able
to go back to the old family house. She had often enough joined Yukiko and
Taeko in complaining about it — surely there was no darker and more un-
hygienic house in the world, and they could not understand what made their

312

Culture in the Present Age

sister live there, and they felt thoroughly depressed after no more than three
days there, and so on— -and yet a deep, indefinable sorrow came over Sachiko
at the news. To lose the Osaka house would be to lose her very roots.10

The military authorities objected to The Makioka Sisters primarily be-
cause it was given over so completely to a portrayal of the private (i.e.,
selfish) affairs of a single family at a time of international crisis, when all
citizens were expected to devote themselves wholeheartedly to the nation.
Nevertheless the book, with its delicate handling of the nuances and
shadings of human relations, was based on a venerable native tradition
— the tradition of mono no aware (a sensitivity to things)— that dated back
at least to the literature of the middle Heian period and such masterpieces
as Kokinshuy The Tales of Ise , and The Tale of Genji . Tanizaki, who, as noted
in the last chapter, became more and more absorbed from mid-life on
with the Japanese past, translated The Tale of Genji into modern Japanese
in the late 1930s, during the time when he began writing The Makioka
Sisters. In many ways, The Makioka Sisters is a “tale of Genji” set in the
present age.

One of Tanizaki ’s most extraordinary pieces of writing is the essay en-
titled In Praise of Shadows. Reminiscent of the fourteenth-century Essays
in Idleness by Yoshida Kenko, it is a miscellany of comments about the
traditional tastes and ways of the Japanese as set against those of the
modern West. The essay is full of nostalgia for the passing of these older
tastes and ways; and so beautifully has Tanizaki pleaded for them that In
Praise of Shadows has powerfully inspired contemporary architects and
others not simply to preserve the past but to use it as a source for art in
the present. The meaning of the essay’s title is made clear in this passage
on the special qualities of the traditional Japanese house:

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled
shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is
darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I
marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of
shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever
device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that
the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing
more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the cross-
beams, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know per-
fectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this
corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in
the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of
which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark
places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered
into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated.
Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows.
Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that
instant revert to mere void.

Culture in the Present Age

313

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this
empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a qual-
ity of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament.11

Kawabata Yasunari expressed perhaps more poignantly than anyone
the shattering despair felt by so many Japanese at war’s end when he
wrote: “I have the strong, unavoidable feeling that my life is already at
an end. For me there is only the solitary return to the mountains and
rivers of the past. From this point on, as one already dead, I intend to
write only of the poor beauty of Japan, not a line else.”12 Even though he
asserts that the defeat in war has driven him to it, Kawabata was by
artistic temperament drawn to write about the “poor beauty of Japan,”
both the land and its people. In spite of his Neoperceptionist and mod-
ernist dabblings in the late 1920s and the 1930s, Kawabata is probably
more Japanese in what is generally understood as the traditional sense
than any other modern novelist. As we saw in the last chapter, he is often
regarded as a writer of haiku- like prose who uses the spare, aesthetically
polished language of poetry to sketch his settings and evoke his moods.
One is, for example, always keenly aware in a Kawabata novel, as in the
poetry by ancient courtier masters, of nature and the seasons, or more
precisely, of the particular nature and seasons of Japan that have shaped
the temperament of its people.

In 1968 Kawabata became the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel
Prize in literature. In his acceptance speech, entitled “Japan the Beautiful
and Myself” (“Utsukushii Nihon no Watakushi”), Kawabata dispelled
any doubts there may have been about how thoroughly rooted and im-
mersed his art was in the traditional culture of Japan. The speech is one
of the finest and most moving paeans to Japanese culture ever composed.
Although it deserves to be reproduced in full in a book of this kind, a
few brief passages must suffice:

The Tale of Genji in particular is the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.
Even down to our day there has not been a piece of fiction to compare with
it. That such a modern work should have been written in the eleventh cen-
tury is a miracle, and as a miracle the work is widely known abroad. Although
my grasp of classical Japanese was uncertain, the Heian classics were my
principal boyhood reading, and it is the Genji, I think, that has meant the
most to me. For centuries after it was written, fascination with the Genji per-
sisted, and imitations and reworkings did homage to it. The Genji was a wide
and deep source of nourishment for poetry, of course, and for the fine arts
and handicrafts as well, and even for landscape gardening.

In the Oriental word for landscape, literally “mountain-water,” with its
related implications in landscape painting and landscape gardening, there is
contained the concept of the sere and wasted, and even of the sad and the
threadbare. Yet in the sad, austere, autumnal qualities so valued by the tea

314

Culture in the Present Age

ceremony, itself summarized in the expression “gently respectful, cleanly
quiet,” there lies concealed a great richness of spirit; and the tea room, so rig-
idly confined and simple, contains boundless space and unlimited elegance. 1 3

It is remarkable that, even as Japan was rising phoenix-like out of the
ashes of war to scale almost unbelievable heights of economic success,
Kawabata, its premier novelist, spoke rhapsodically to the world about an-
other, exquisitely beautiful Japan — a Japan that might be too fragile to
survive the profit-seeking, commercial exploitation, and physical and cul-
tural pollution that helped make such success possible.

Kawabata ’s postwar work The Sound of the Mountain ( Yama no Oto ,
1949) illustrates the characteristically loose-flowing Japanese novel to
which The Makioka Sisters stands in such contrast. To Kawabata, the nat-
ural world and life within it have their own ways of moving and function-
ing; the things that happen to us and around us are infinitely varied and
ever changing, and any effort to impose too much rationality upon them
is bound to fail and is in itself a false or dishonest act on the part of an
artist. Such an attitude enabled Kawabata to exhibit a striking “sensitivity
to things,” and in the larger sense joined him to the aesthetic tradition of
mono no azvare that permeated the classical literature with which he, like
Tanizaki, was so intimately familiar. But whereas Tanizaki had, in The
Makioka Sisters3 explored chiefly the intimacies of human relations, Kawa-
bata in his writings also used mono no azvare to deal with the subtle re-
sponses of people to the natural settings within which they lived.

An example of Kawabata’s poetic handling of perceptions — like the
linking of verses in a renga sequence — is the following passage from The
Sound of the Mountain :

The moon was bright.

One of his daughter-in-law’s dresses was hanging outside, unpleasantly
gray. Perhaps she had forgotten to take in her laundry, or perhaps she had left
a sweat-soaked garment to take the dew of night.

A screeching of insects came from the garden. There were locusts on the
trunk of the cherry tree to the left. He had not known that locusts could
make such a rasping sound; but locusts indeed they were.

He wondered if locusts might sometimes be troubled with nightmares.

A locust flew in and lit on the skirt of the mosquito net. It made no sound
as he picked it up.

“A mute.” It would not be one of the locusts he had heard at the tree.

Lest it fly back in, attracted by the light, he threw it with all his strength
toward the top of the tree. He felt nothing against his hand as he released it.

Gripping the shutter, he looked toward the tree. He could not tell whether
the locust had lodged there or flown on. There was a vast depth to the moon-
lit night, stretching far on either side.

Though August had only begun, autumn insects were already singing. He
thought he could detect a dripping of dew from leaf to leaf.1 1

Culture in the Present Age

315

The perceiver in this scene is the main character of the novel, Shingo, a
man in his sixties who is engulfed in the unhappiness of himself and those
around him — a wife he has long ceased to love, a son who callously
ignores his own wife for a mistress, and an embittered daughter just re-
turned home from a disastrous marriage. In the midst of this turmoil of
personal relationships, Shingo increasingly senses the specter of his own
death. His forgetfulness, at first seemingly attributable to age, leads to a
blurring of his awareness between consciousness and dreaming, between
things that happened long ago and events as they unfold in the present.

To Kawabata the world is a whole and man and nature are one, and
he brilliantly handles Shingo as a perceiver both of human relations and
of nature and its phenomena. In mood, The Sound of the Mountain is very
much part of what appears to be the enduring Japanese tradition of sad
beauty that is also connoted by mono no aware .

A category of writing that inevitably made its appearance in the post-
war period was that of books dealing with the war itself. Virtually with-
out exception they were harshly critical of the war (indeed, all wars) and
of Japan’s military establishment that conducted it. Perhaps the most ter-
rifyingly stark depiction of the collapse of the once triumphant Japa-
nese Imperial Army is Ooka Shohei’s Fires on the Plain ( Nobi , 1952),
the story of a soldier who is expelled from his unit in the last days of the
campaign in the Philippines because the unit, far from having a capacity
to continue fighting, no longer possesses even the means to attend to
the barest needs of its members. Wandering through the forests of Leyte
with only the vaguest hope of eventually reaching a place from which he
can be evacuated, the soldier comes upon a deserted village where he
finds the corpses of Japanese soldiers piled at the steps leading to a
church and, without pausing to consider his act, murders a defenseless
Filipino woman who has returned to the village with her lover in search
of salt. Upon leaving the village, the soldier encounters other soldiers
similarly separated from their units and hears ominous rumors that
famine is so widespread within the Japanese army that some men have
even resorted to cannibalism. Later he comes across a dying officer who,
in a last stage of delirium, raises his arm and exclaims: “When Pm dead,
you may eat this.” The climax of the novel is reached when the soldier
meets two former companions and partakes with them of “monkey
meat.” It is not long before the soldier has occasion to learn the true
source of his food when he witnesses one of his companions on a
“monkey”-hunting excursion:

There was a bang in the distance.

“He’s got one!” shouted Yasuda.

I rushed out and ran through the forest in the direction of the shot. Pres-
ently I reached a spot where the trees grew sparsely and from where I could
see across the river bed. A human form was flying over its sun-drenched sur-

316

Culture in the Present Age

face! His hair was in disorder and he was barefoot. It was a Japanese soldier
in a green uniform. And it was not Nagamatsu!

Again there was the report of a gun. The bullet went wide of its apparent
mark and the crouched figure continued running. He ran steadily along the
river bed, now and then glancing back over his shoulder. Then, evidently
confident that he was out of range, he gradually straightened his back and
slowed down to a walking pace. Finally he disappeared into a clump of trees.

Now I had seen one of the “monkeys.”15

Whereas Fires on the Plain describes the degradation of the Japanese
soldier in the field,16 Zone of Emptiness (< Shinku Chitai , 1952) by Noma
Hiroshi reveals a scarcely less extreme form of brutalization and degrada-
tion of the military man in camp at home. A young soldier, Kitani, has
just returned from the prison stockade, where he has spent two years for
the falsely alleged theft of a lieutenant’s wallet. Japan’s “holy war” has
entered its final stage of deterioration and disillusionment, and men of all
ranks are now engaged in a bestial struggle to secure rations and to avoid
the certain death implicit in overseas assignment. But Kitani is fired only
with the determination to avenge himself against those responsible for his
conviction and unusually harsh sentence and to see once again the prosti-
tute he loved, but who may also have betrayed him. As the true story of
Kitani’s case is gradually revealed, we are shown the horror-filled inner
workings of a totally corrupt system of military life whose every official act
is shrilly justified in terms of military reverence for, and selfless devotion
to, emperor and nation. In the confessional words of his chief accuser,
the lieutenant, whom Kitani finally tracks down:

The army is cruel. . . . There’s nothing to keep me from saying it now. The
army of the interior is rotten to the core, to the very core. When I was over-
seas, I used to hear it said that the army of the interior had preserved the old
traditions of honor and dignity. . . . Unfortunately, when I returned I realized
that this was completely untrue, that everything was worse than I could ever
have imagined. At first, I did what I could, as an officer, to maintain stan-
dards. That’s what caused my downfall. I loved the army with all my heart. It
was impossible for me to tolerate the people who jeered at it and besmirched
it, but then I found myself coming up against powerful obstacles, colonels,
majors . . . the regiment . . . the division. . . . It’s all a matter of pleasing your
superiors. And not only the officers, but even, if I may say so, their fami-
lies. ... I once knew a quartermaster sergeant who was regarded as the most
level-headed noncommissioned officer in the entire corps. . . . Well, his wife
was unable to leave the house of the battalion head . . . because her presence
was indispensable to her husband’s advancement. . . . That kind of thing
filled me with shame. . . . The supplies that are delivered go straight to the
commanding officer, who uses them for making personal gifts. . . . You know
Lieutenant Shimorai, don’t you? He had a house built for himself, the one he
now lives in. I was unable to put up with such corruption. I tried to do some-

Culture in the Present Age

317

thing about it, but I was beaten. It’s too big a job for one man ... I was kicked
out. I got sick. I no longer count. Kitani ... I thought that you had been
bought by Lieutenant Nakabori. That was why I let you be brought up before
the court-martial. When I realized the truth, it was too late.17

In Zone of Emptiness Noma, a leftist writer from prewar days and himself
a veteran of the army, attempts once and for all to demolish the most
sacred sustaining myths of emperor worship and the kokutai ideology.

A third book of major importance that deals with the war is Ibuse
Masuji’s Black Rain ( Kuroi Ame), an account of the dropping of the
atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Based on actual records of the material de-
struction and human agony caused by the bomb, Black Rain is the story
of many people, but especially of Shigematsu and his niece Yasuko. In a
narrative consisting largely of diary accounts of Shigematsu and others,
we meet the inhabitants of Hiroshima and its environs on the day of
the bomb, observe their fate with horror at the moment of the bomb’s
detonation, and then join the survivors as they wander in bewilderment
through the nightmarish labyrinth of a devastated city. The present of
the novel is set several years after the war’s end, and the tale of the bomb
and its aftermath is recounted by Shigematsu essentially in the wish to
set the record straight about Yasuko who, because of her exposure to the
bomb’s radiation, is unable to find a husband. In fact, Yasuko is seriously
ill with radiation sickness, and the description of her suffering once the
symptoms of the sickness become manifest is heartrending.

The semidocumentary material contained in this long book could
easily have been presented in an exploitative and sensationalistic way; but
the author has exercised considerable artistic restraint, and has thereby
fashioned Black Rain into a devastatingly effective indictment of the evil
futility of war. It should not be supposed, however, that Black Rain is all
darkness and grief. There runs through it the theme, although it is some-
times only dimly perceivable, of hope and the will to survive. This is made
symbolically explicit at the end when, as others listen indoors to the
emperor’s broadcast announcing surrender, Shigematsu wanders aim-
lessly around outside and, upon gazing into a stream, makes a surprising
discovery:

How had I never realized there was such an attractive stream so near at hand?
In the water, I could see a procession of baby eels swimming blithely
upstream against the current. It was remarkable to watch them: a myriad of
tiny eels, still at the larval stage, none of them more than three or four inches
in length.

“On you go, on up the stream!” I said to them encouragingly. “You can
smell fresh water. I’ll be bound!” Still they came on unendingly, battling their
way upstream in countless numbers. They must have swum all the way up
from the lower reaches of the river at Hiroshima.18

318

Culture in the Present Age

Along with translated novels, film became one of the most important
media for the transmission of Japanese culture to the West in the postwar
period, which soon developed into a golden age of cinema.19 The main
impetus for this was the excellence in cinematic work already achieved in
a remarkably short time by prewar Japanese filmmakers. The film industry
was also able to expand its activities rapidly after the surrender because
the facilities of the major studios — Shochiku, Toho, and Daiei — had suf-
fered no serious war damage and because SCAP adopted a policy of en-
couraging the reconstruction and building of movie theatres to provide
entertainment for the people. At the same time, despite its generally lib-
erating attitude toward freedom of speech and expression elsewhere,
SCAP saw fit to impose a fairly wide-ranging censorship on the themes
that could be treated in movies. Among those forbidden were nationalism,
revenge, patriotism, the distortion of historical facts, racial or religious
discrimination, feudal loyalty, suicide, the oppression of women and deg-
radation of wives, antidemocratic attitudes, and anything that opposed
the provisions of the Potsdam Declaration and the directives of SCAR

In their efforts to live with the censorship — or, when possible, to cir-
cumvent it — Japanese producers and directors were forced to resort to
stratagems and persuasive arguments. For example, in order to secure
permission to make Utamaro and His Five Women ( Utamaro o Meguru
Gonin no Onna , 1946), its director, Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956),
pointed out to SCAP that the late-Tokugawa-period woodblock artist
Utamaro was not only a cultural hero to the common man in Japan, he
was even a kind of prototype of a modern democrat! Mizoguchi also
hinted that he would like to take up the theme of female emancipation in
a subsequent film.20

Inundated by American culture, customs, and fads, Japanese film-
makers began experimenting with new practices and techniques of acting
that, if not revolutionary, were at least attention-getting. One of the most
widely heralded of these practices was the kiss, an act strictly banned from
Japanese films before the war and even deleted from foreign imports. To
the prewar Japanese the kiss had been “an act reserved solely for the pri-
vacy of the bedroom, if not indeed something of an occult art.”21 Even
after the kiss became generally accepted, it was often faked by having the
actors angle their heads away from the camera and merely touch cheeks.
Some actors apparently even sought to avoid pollution while kissing by
covering their mouths with gauze and applying an extra layer of makeup
to conceal it.

Among the most popular postwar films, both in Japan and abroad,
have been those of Kurosawa Akira (1910-98), including Rashomon
(1950), Ikiru (To Live , 1952), and Seven Samurai ( Shichinin no Samuraiy
1954). Kurosawa has been called the most Western of Japanese film
directors, and it is true that in content his films, particularly those that
are highly action-oriented (such as Seven Samurai ) or deal with events by

Culture in the Present Age

319

means of an Existentialist kind of psychological probing (such as Rashd-
mon ), are more readily and universally comprehensible than the films of
many other Japanese directors. Yet Kurosawa, a consummate cinematic
craftsman by any international standard, was also a master of those tech-
niques— the creation of moods and settings that perfectly blend people
and their natural environments, the meticulous attention to the details
and textures of life and things — that are the stylistic glories of the Japa-
nese film.

Based on a story by Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Rashomon recounts an
incident set in ancient times involving a lord and his wife who, while
journeying through a forest, are confronted and set upon by a bandit. At
least two facts in the ensuing series of events are undisputed: the bandit
violated the wife, and the husband was killed. Otherwise we are presented
with a startling set of contradictory interpretations of what truly hap-
pened, as the story is told and retold through the eyes of the wife, the
bandit, the dead lord (speaking through a medium), and a woodcutter
who chanced to witness the incident. Depending upon which version one
believes, the husband was killed in a duel with the bandit to uphold his
wife’s honor, or he killed himself in mortification over the ravishment of
his wife, or he was killed when incited to duel with the bandit by the
wife after first seeking to disassociate himself from her behavior.

Seven Samurai , an action film of enormous vitality, tells the story of a
group of rdniny or masterless samurai, who are hired by a farming village
in the sixteenth century to protect it against marauding bandits. It is one
of the finest war films ever made, and as such it shows men in the most
extreme circumstances faced with choices that must be irrevocably made
— choices that openly, even brutally, call into question the most firmly
held values and perceptions, however dimly sensed, relating to the mean-
ings of their lives. Much of the humanism that forms the basis of the story
is exemplified in the conduct in life and in death of the last samurai (really
a peasant masquerading as a warrior), who is played in a grandly swash-
buckling manner by Mifune Toshiro (1920-97), the quintessential Kuro-
sawa hero. But Seven Samurai is much more than simply a war film. It is
a visually and aesthetically magnificent work of art presented in a setting
that, in the most venerable native tradition, reveals the eternal Japanese
sensitivity to the flow of time, especially as experienced in the passage of
the seasons, and to the finite quality of man in nature and not opposed
to it. There could be no more eloquent statement of this sensitivity than
the ending of the film when, after the bandits have been repulsed for
good, the villagers must turn their attention to spring planting and the
surviving samurai are obliged, after briefly paying their respects at the
graves of their comrades, to move on. Thus they resume the status of
ronin — a status that implies social uncertainty and, once again, an absence
of direction or meaning in life.

In Ikiru Kurosawa dealt, in a contemporary setting, with the crisis of

320

Culture in the Present Age

a man who is informed that he is terminally ill with cancer. A petty
bureaucrat nearing retirement, the man realizes that for years he has led
a joyless and robotlike existence, his private life a void and his public
vision restricted to his own worm’s-eye view of the functioning of gov-
ernment. He determines to do one socially meaningful, good thing
before he dies, and he thereupon embarks upon a campaign to bring
about the construction of a small park after the petition for it by a group
of neighborhood people has been interminably delayed and misdirected
through a maze of bureaucratic offices, including his own. Ikiru is an
uncompromising critique of officialdom and the world of bureaucratic
inertia.

If Kurosawa is to be regarded as the most Western of Japanese film
directors, then his polar opposite is Ozu Yasujiro (1903-63), the most
Japanese of all directors. A leader in film since the prewar period, Ozu
focused his attention almost entirely on the conflict between the tradi-
tional and the modern as seen through changing relationships in the
Japanese family. The historical antecedents of films on the family (the
shomin-geki discussed in the preceding chapter) were the domestic plays
(sewamono) of the puppet and kabuki theatres of Tokugawa times and
the I-novels of naturalist and other writers in the modern age. The classic
dilemma that confronted the individual in the Tokugawa domestic play,
it will be recalled, was between the demands of duty (giri) and the pull
of human emotions (ninjo). In the stylized plots of the period — for
example, the prototypical story of the passion of a merchant, who is al-
ready married and has children, for a prostitute— the dilemma was char-
acteristically resolved by double suicide (shinju). Social pressures after
the war, of course, were much less severe, and double suicide was no
longer common; but the domestic dilemma remained, with giri often
taken to mean the demands of the traditional Japanese family and ninjo
the pull of modern ways.

To understand why this should represent a specially Japanese, rather
than universal, problem, we must note that there are few analogues to
the Japanese family and the enormous importance it has held in Japa-
nese society. It is simply a fact, as outsiders constantly observe, that the
Japanese are overwhelmingly group-oriented: they work in groups; they
play in groups; they seem happiest in groups. Such extraordinary feeling
for collective behavior has its origins in the family, and any rejection of,
or failure to conform to, the family raises for the Japanese the most seri-
ous questions about his role in society as a whole.

In Ozu’s films, such as the powerful and moving Tokyo Story ( Tokyo
Monogatariy 1953), the clash between the traditional and the modern is
commonly portrayed in generational terms — that is, in the conflict be-
tween a traditional parent and an independent-minded modern child. But
the social implications of such a clash are far greater in the Japanese set-

Culture in the Present Age

321

ting than they would be in the Western. Whereas the Western child would
most likely think of his parent merely as too conservative or old-fashioned,
the Japanese youth is intensely conscious that the parent represents a tra-
ditional and still precisely understood pattern of conduct that continues
to call all Japanese, to one degree or another, to account.

Ozu preferred scripts constructed less in narrative than in chronicle
form, providing dialogues that are closer to the way people normally
speak and scenes that are extremely natural in feeling (fig. 68). He also
used almost exclusively a single camera shot taken from the eye level of a
person seated on tatami . As Donald Richie observes, “This traditional
view is the view in repose, commanding a very limited field of vision but
commanding it entirely. It is the attitude for watching, not listening; it is
the position from which one sees the Noh, from which one partakes of
the tea ceremony.”22

The message typically conveyed by an Ozu domestic or popular drama
is that life (which is suffused with the same kind of sadness derived from
the sense of mono no aware that we find in the novels of Kawabata) will
go on pretty much as it has. Young people will still be drawn to the
modern, and their elders will continue to find contentment, if not total
solace, in the carefully defined world of tradition. Other directors, how-
ever, have by no means shared Ozu’s timeless, almost fatalistic view of
things. An important example is the work of Naruse Mikio, another
established director from the prewar period, whose postwar films in-
clude When a Woman Ascends the Stairs ( Onna ga Kaidan o Agaru Toki,

Fig. 68 Scene from Tokyo Story, directed by Ozu Yasujiro (New Yorker Films)

322

Culture in the Present Age

1960) and Flowing (Nagareru). Naruse sees the traditional family-
oriented ways as even more binding than Ozu implies and seems to
doubt that few Japanese, if any, can fully escape them. In When a Woman
Ascends the Stairs , the still young and attractive proprietress, or mama -
san , of a walk-up bar in Tokyo’s Ginza section accepts, in violation of
her professional code, the advances of a patron and agrees to marry
him. In fact, the man is already married, and when the woman meets his
wife she realizes that, despite what she had regarded as her own modern
and even liberated views, she cannot be responsible for the destruction
of a family. In the end she once again ascends the stairs alone to her bar,
resigned to resuming the role of a mama-san who banters with and
flatters her patrons but does not get seriously involved with them.

The contemporary Japanese cinema is of such rich diversity that dis-
cussion of the films of a few directors, no matter how important they
may be, obviously cannot cover the subject adequately. But, along with
Ozu and Kurosawa, the greatest master of film has been Mizoguchi Kenji
(1898-1956), director of the incomparably beautiful Ugetsu (Ugetsu
Monogatari, 1953). 23 Viewed from different perspectives, Mizoguchi can
be seen as the most romantically traditional of Japanese directors and
also as an artist concerned with modern social issues. His traditional side
was essentially aesthetic and was probably most fully revealed in his ability
to create and sustain atmosphere, particularly in films of the past or some
mythical age long ago, such as Ugetsu , the tale of a craftsman in the
medieval age of civil wars who journeys to a city to sell his pottery and is
drawn into an affair by a lovely patroness (fig. 69). In this atmospheri-
cally most perfect of films, much of the sense of wonder derives from
our uncertainty about what is real and unreal. The craftsman discovers
that his affair with the lovely patroness is part of an enchanted spell under
which he has fallen; yet when he seeks to return home to his wife, he
finds that she also no longer exists but has been dead for many years.

Mizoguchi’s modern side is to be found mainly in his treatment of
women, including the themes of the importance of their love to men and
the fearful way in which they were victimized in traditional, feudal Japan.
The latter theme is starkly drawn in Sansho the Bailiff ( Sanshd Dayu ,
1954), an overpoweringly tragic story of the wife, son, and daughter of a
provincial official in ancient times who are kidnapped by outlaws and sold
into slavery, the son and daughter to one group and the wife to another.
Upon growing to manhood the son escapes, thanks to his sister, who
sacrifices her life to delay his pursuers. The son soon becomes an impor-
tant official himself, but he abandons his position in order to search for
his mother. When he finally finds her, she is a blind old woman who has
been used over the years as a prostitute and has even had the tendons of
her legs cut to prevent her from running away.

Although in Sansho the Bailiff Mizoguchi introduced social criticism

into a historical setting, he remained— like his compeers Ozu and Kuro-
sawa— strongly sentimental about the old Japan and its traditional ways.
Other directors, such as Kobayashi Masaki, have rejected what they
regard as this all too easy sentimentalism and have instead focused un-
compromising attention on the cruelty and crushing inequities of tradi-
tional society. In Harakiri ( Seppuku , 1962) Kobayashi presented the
story of a Tokugawa period rbnin who visits a domain to request suste-
nance and vows that he will disembowel himself if it is refused. Regard-
ing the rbnin as a mere nuisance, officials of the domain summarily reject
his request and order him to make good his vow by performing harakiri
in their presence. As he prepares for the grim ceremony, the rbnin speaks
to the officials about another masterless samurai who had called upon
them a short while before with a request identical to his and who had
been forced to perform harakiri with a bamboo sword, the only weapon
he carried. The ronin reveals that the earlier samurai was his son, who
had been driven in desperation to come to the domain to obtain food for
his starving wife and child. Informing his captors that he has already
taken the topknots (the symbols of samurai manhood) of three of their
fellow officials who were responsible for his son’s death, the rbnin seizes
his sword and, in classic charnbara style, kills a number of the enemy
before he is finally destroyed.

324

Culture in the Present Age

Along with other filmmakers of the postwar period, Kobayashi also
directed severe criticism against modern Japanese society. His most ambi-
tious undertaking, for example, was the three-part drama of the horrors
of Japan’s participation in World War II — the setting is Manchuria —
entitled The Human Condition (N ingen no Jd ken, 1958-61). In an inter-
view with the American critic Joan Mellen, Kobayashi said that he re-
garded Harakiri and The Human Condition as similar in theme insofar as
they both deal with the “tenacious human resilience” of individuals under
the authoritarian pressures of society.24

Other branches of the performing arts, including the modern theatre
(shingeki) and kabuki, also flourished after the war, though on admittedly
much smaller scales and not before overcoming their own particular post-
war traumas.

The basis of shingeki since its inception has been the theatrical com-
pany rather than the independent producer as in American theatre. Dur-
ing the war there was only one active company — the Literary Theatre
(Bungakuza) — and the number of theatre houses accessible to it was
severely reduced by bombing raids. Peace brought a feeling of theatrical
revolution within shingeki as part of the general hope that accompanied
the end of the war.

But the most fundamental difficulties confronting shingeki in the post-
war period were the same that had always bedeviled it. Foremost was the
fact that the very word for theatre — engeki — overwhelmingly connoted to
the Japanese a presentational rather than representational kind of per-
forming art. Specifically, it meant kabuki, and the shingeki people had
been obliged from the first to try to distinguish theirs as a “new” or
“modern” theatre. Even as shingeki struggled to establish its own acting
and theatrical traditions, it was upstaged by a rapidly rising film indus-
try, which was able to advance just a step behind the cinema in the West
to become a truly modern, realistic theatre of representation in its own
right. Still another difficulty encountered by shingeki in its early stages of
development was the deep rift that arose between those who wished to
keep it an exclusively literary or theatrical medium and those who aspired
to transform it into an ideological (kannen-teki) form of theatre. This
led, as we have noticed, to the dominance in shingeki of proletarian
writers in the late 1920s and the 1930s and to its suppression by the
military authorities. Once again, in the postwar period, political ideology
became a source of contention within shingeki.

If shingeki ’s difficulties remained the same after the war, some of its
attempted solutions also evoked a familiar feeling. One of the means by
which shingeki sought to deal with poor attendance figures, for example,
was to stage Western plays in translation, including Shakespeare’s A Mid-
summer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet . Among contempo-
rary works, Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur

Culture in the Present Age

325

Miller’s Death of a Salesman (the latter produced by a left-wing theatrical
company) enjoyed successful runs. But foreign plays could in the long
run contribute little to the advancement of a native theatre, and the rela-
tive prosperity shingeki has had since the war is attributable also to the
original work of Japanese playwrights. Of particular interest has been
the writing of plays for shingeki by well-known novelists, most notably
Mishima Yukio (1925-70) and Abe Kobo (1924-93).

Mishima, who had strong neoclassical tastes, is perhaps best remem-
bered as a playwright for his use of both the Japanese and Western pasts.
Among his writings are modern no plays, several kabuki pieces, and
works drawn from Western history, such as Madame de Sade (1965),
which is set at the time of the French Revolution. Abe, on the other
hand, devoted himself to avant-garde, experimental theatre, as we can
see in such plays as Friends (1967) and The Man Who Turned into a Stick
(1969). But even though Mishima and Abe may differ in the periods —
past and present — they chose to explore, they both significantly advanced
Japanese theatre by avoiding the pitfalls of earlier, prewar playwrights,
who tried to create modern Japanese plays essentially by incorporating
into them elements from the realistic tradition of theatre in the west.25
The plays of Mishima and Abe are original works, free from the con-
straints of realism, that have served to inspire other playwrights to press
forward in the development of a truly modern Japanese theatre.

Kabuki faced a situation and prospects quite different from those of
shingeki in the postwar period. In its origins, of course, kabuki was a
bourgeois theatre that the Tokugawa authorities at first had barely toler-
ated. Yet by modern times kabuki had unchallengeably become the main
theatre of Japan. Although its low beginning may never have been entirely
forgotten, part of its repertory was also viewed as a repository of tradi-
tional morality and the feudalistic values of the premodern samurai class.
It was for this reason that the military authorities generally favored it
during the war26 and for the very same reason that SCAP cast such a
jaundiced eye upon kabuki after the war and strictly forebade the perfor-
mance of “feudalistic” works, such as Chushingura (Treasury of Loyal
Retainers), the perennially popular dramatization of the vendetta carried
out by forty-seven ronin in the early eighteenth century. But by about
1947 the SCAP-imposed restrictions on kabuki were relaxed, and it
promptly began to enjoy a brisk revival. Today, kabuki enjoys enormous
favor and at least one of its actors, Bando Tamasaburo, is a popular star
of the magnitude of a leading rock-and-roll musician.

One of the arts that perforce drew much attention in the postwar
period, owing to the destructiveness of the war itself, was architecture.
Many of Japan’s largest cities, including Tokyo, had been devastated by
Allied high-explosive and incendiary bombing raids, and there was a

326

Culture in the Present Age

desperate need for new buildings of all kinds. But because of the rela-
tively low priority given by SCAP to the physical reconstruction of Japa-
nese cities and the gap between any drawing up and implementation of
large-scale architectural projects, the postwar building boom in Japan
did not begin until the early 1930s. To understand the directions then
taken in building, it will be helpful to review briefly the general course of
architectural development during the preceding century.

Traditional Japanese architecture was based almost entirely on the
use of wood in construction. Hie advent of Western influences about
the time of the Meiji Restoration brought a sweeping technological revo-
lution in architecture through the introduction of an array of new build-
ing materials, including cement, steel, and bricks. By the beginning of
the twentieth century, as modern capitalist industries began to achieve
significant growth in Japan, techniques of reinforced-concrete construc-
tion were also widely applied in the erection in Tokyo and other great
cities of large plant- and office-type buildings.

The earliest Western-style buildings erected during the Meiji period
— in a conglomeration of modes, including Gothic, Renaissance, and
Baroque — were actually designed by foreign architects, such as the
Englishman Josiah Condor, who arrived in Japan in 1877. Among the
buildings done by Condor were the National Museum at Ueno Park and
the Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Mansion) which, as noted in Chapter 9, be-
came a symbol of what many regarded as the over- Westernization of
Japan in the late nineteenth century. Condor taught at the Tokyo Tech-
nical College (which later became the Department of Architecture at
Tokyo University) and greatly influenced many of the young Japanese
architects who rose to prominence in the late Meiji period. But, as one
scholar has put it, the Japanese architects of this age used “only the tech-
niques and external forms of the industrial civilization of the West, with-
out understanding its spiritual background. Consequently it was quite
natural that they placed more stress on the engineering side in adopting
Occidental customs.”27 In addition, the engineering side of architecture
was also stressed because of the importance attached by the Japanese
government to structural design for the purpose of protection against
earthquakes.

It was not until the second decade of the twentieth century — at the
same time as the modernist movement in Western architecture com-
menced— that Japanese architects began to display a more sophisticated
and discerning attitude toward the problems and potentialities of mod-
ern building construction. Stimulated by the ideas of Walter Gropius, Le
Corbusier, and others from the West, they were given new opportunities
through increased building demand resulting from the economic boom
that, as noted in the preceding chapter, Japan enjoyed when the Euro-
pean powers withdrew from competition for Far Eastern markets during
World War I. Among the questions Japanese architects began to grapple

Culture in the Present Age

327

with in this period were the relationship between function and decora-
tion (functionalism was then much in vogue in Europe), how materials
should be used to accent or enhance their special qualities, and how
architecture could best be directed toward humanistic rather than de-
humanizing ends.

Probably the most important issue approached by Japanese architects
during the period of World War I and its aftermath was how Japan’s tra-
ditional tastes in building could be combined with the modern architec-
tural values of the West. Among the most obvious of these traditional
tastes were: the natural use of materials, such as unpainted wood and
rough, earthen-type walls; the handling of space— essentially by means
of thin, adjustable partitioning — to create a sense of continuity or flow
between one part of the interior of a building and another and even be-
tween interior and exterior; and an emphasis on geometrically arranged
straight lines in design, deriving mainly from retention of the ancient
post-and-beam style of construction. All of these qualities are perfectly
represented in that most flawless of traditional Japanese architectural
masterpieces, the Tokugawa-period Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto.
Yet the modern Japanese themselves remained almost totally oblivious to
Katsura’s virtues until prodded into reflecting upon them in the 1930s
by an expatriate from Nazi Germany, Bruno Taut (1880-1938).

Shortly after Taut’s arrival in Japan in 1933, a Japanese architectural
authority noted, “Fifty years ago Europeans came and told us, ‘Nikko is
the most valuable,’ and we thought so too; now Bruno Taut has come
and told us, ‘It is Ise and Katsura which are the most valuable,’ and
again we believe.”28 In a speech in 1936 to the Society for International
Cultural Relations (Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai) in Tokyo, Taut had this
to say about the Ise Shrine:

Everything in Ise is artistic, nothing is artificial. There are no peculiarities:
the natural wood is faultless and marvellously polished, and the straw roof is
equally perfect in its gorgeous curve, without the upcurve of the ridge or of
the eaves. Equally flawless is the joining of the wood with the stone of the
foundations, and there is no ornament which is not integral to the architec-
tonic character. The golden globules on the cross-beams under the ridge join
the harmony of straw and hinoki [cypress] wood, and the white papers and
green branches of the Shinto sect are unsurpassably in accord with the
whole.29

Taut went on to observe that, though the “Japanese pretend that the
atmosphere of age exerts a particular fascination on them,” it is the eter-
nal newness and freshness of the Ise Shrine that impresses him as being
most fundamentally Japanese. Of the Katsura Detached Palace, he said:

. . . only at Katsura does there exist that overwhelming freedom of intellect
which does not subordinate any element of the structure or the garden to
some rigid system. At Nikko, as in many architectural attractions of the world,

328

Culture in the Present Age

the effect is gained by quantity — about in the same way that an army of two
hundred thousand is larger than one of twenty thousand. At Katsura, on the
contrary, each element remains a free individual, much like a member of a
good society in which harmony arises from absence of coercion so that every-
one may express himself according to his individual nature. Thus the Katsura
Palace is a completely isolated miracle in the civilized world. One must speak
of its “eternal beauty/* which admonishes us to create in the same spirit
much more than is the case with the Parthenon, with the Gothic Cathedral or
with the Ise Shrine. That which is peculiar to Japan, the local, is insignificant;
but the principle is absolutely modern and of complete validity for any con-
temporary architecture.30

For Taut, “Japan’s architectural arts could not rise higher than Katsura,
nor sink lower than Nikko.”

One of the great events in the history of modern architecture in Japan
was the construction of the Imperial Hotel in central Tokyo by Frank
Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) between 1919 and 1922. Wright, who had
visited Japan as early as 1905, was a keen admirer of East Asian art,
acquiring Buddhist statuary and an extensive collection of Japanese
woodblock prints from the Edo period. Among the most daring innova-
tors in modern architecture, he forcefully advocated an “organic” ap-
proach to design and construction, by which he meant that the architect
should not only seek to achieve unity and harmony in the functional fea-
tures of a building but also allow it— whether home, office building, or
hotel — to emerge organically within its particular setting and social con-
text. Facing on Hibiya Park, not far from the emperor’s palace, the Impe-
rial Hotel was a low, rambling structure made of reinforced concrete
with a brick-encrusted and heavily decorated exterior (fig. 70). In the
interior, Wright made dramatic use of space, raising and lowering ceil-
ing height. Determined to achieve total unity of structural planning
and decoration, he even went so far as to design personally the contents
of the guest rooms, including beds, chairs, tables, and wall hangings.
To the undying dismay of its many admirers, Wright’s original Imperial
Hotel, having survived both the 1923 Tokyo earthquake and the bomb-
ing raids of World War II, was demolished in the late 1960s to make way
for the present multistory New Imperial Hotel. But the old structure
remains vivid in historical memory, not only for its intrinsic qualities as
an architectural masterpiece but also as a direct statement to the Japa-
nese by one of the most powerfully individualistic Western artists of the
early twentieth century.

One of the most interesting aspects of Wright’s impact on Japanese
architecture after World War I was that in part it was a kind of feeding
back of influences Wright had himself received earlier from the Japa-
nese. Westerners had displayed interest in Japanese architecture, espe-
cially the traditional house, since at least the 1870s. The American

Culture in the Present Age

329

Fig. 70 Old Imperial Hotel in Tokyo* designed by Frank Lloyd Wright

Edward Morse (1838 1925), known for his discovery of prehistoric
Jomon remains at Omori in the outskirts of Tokyo, made a detailed study
of Japanese domestic architecture about this time, and in 1885 published
Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, a text that over the years has
gone through many printings. Styles of Japanese architecture were also
introduced at fairs and exhibitions in the late nineteenth century, most
notably in the display prepared for the World’s Columbian Exposition at
Chicago in 1892, which commemorated the four hundredth anniversary
of the discovery of America. Designed and constructed by the Japanese
themselves, the Chicago display was modeled loosely on the Phoenix
Hall of the eleventh-century Byodoin Temple at Uji. The original Phoe-
nix Hall consists of a central hall with galleries extending like wings to
the right and left (and terminating in open pavilions) and like a bird’s
body and tail to the rear. At Chicago the rear gallery was eliminated and
the pavilions were enclosed. This created an arrangement of three linked
structures of extremely graceful design, situated on raised platform floors
and covered with gently sloping and deeply recessed tile roofs. The inte-
rior of each structure was designed and decorated to represent a different
period of domestic styling in Japanese history: Fujiwara, Ashikaga, and
Tokugawa.

The Japanese display at the 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition,
called the Phoenix Villa, was particularly striking in contrast to the op-
pressively heavy type of architecture adopted for the general exhibition
halls, which were “cast in the pure classic, or Neo-classic style, employ-

330

Culture in the Present Age

ing the familiar design vocabulary of columns, entablatures, arches, vaults
and domes, the group unified by a gigantic architectural order sixty feet
in height.”31 Although architects throughout the country visited and were
impressed by the Phoenix Villa, it was the Chicago School, including
Frank Lloyd Wright, that benefited most from study of this excellent,
near-at-hand model of Japanese structure and design, which was pre-
sented to the city of Chicago and preserved until 1946. Wright expressed
his enthusiasm for traditional Japanese architecture in the following
words:

I saw the native home in Japan as a supreme study in elimination — not only
of dirt but the elimination of the insignificant. So the Japanese house natu-
rally fascinated me and I would spend hours taking it all to pieces and putting
it together again. I saw nothing meaningless in the Japanese home and could
find very little added in the way of ornament [the equivalent of ornament
being achieved] by bringing out and polishing the beauty of the simple mate-
rials they used in making the building . . . and strangely enough, I found this
ancient Japanese dwelling to be a perfect example of the modern standardiz-
ing I had myself been working out. The floor mats, removable for cleaning,
are all three feet by six feet. The size and shape of all the houses are both
determined by these mats. The sliding partitions all occur at the unit lines of
the mats [and the] polished wooden posts ... all stand at the intersection of
the mats. 32

Despite the example of Wright and the promise of more indepen-
dence and even innovation of approach inherent in the new sentiments
of Japanese architects, the 1920s and 1930s witnessed a general contin-
uation of the earlier reliance upon, and imitation of. Western architec-
tural trends.33 For example, rather than attempt in the best traditional
manner — and with the encouragement of Taut — to allow structure to
determine design (as in the classical straight-line patterning of build-
ings, such as Katsura, based on post-and-beam construction), they
succumbed to the Western use of massive walls that obliterated all struc-
tural features. It is true that, with the approach of the China and Pacific
wars, the emergent military leaders of Japan sought to promote the
development of a “national style” in modern architecture, but this
tended to be an effort more to excise Western elements from Japanese
buildings than to encourage the pursuit of new and progressive native
lines of development.

Whereas before World War II the Japanese had been influenced
chiefly by European architectural styles, after the war the main foreign
influence was, probably unavoidably, American. One result of this trend
was that, while such countries as England, France, and Germany placed
great emphasis on city planning in the rebuilding of their war-torn cities,
the Japanese — in the absence of a significant American interest in it —
devoted little attention to overall planning once postwar rebuilding had
begun in earnest during the early 1950s.34

Culture in the Present Age

331

To the general neglect of housing needs, highest priority in the early
part of the postwar building boom in Japan was given — especially in the
largest cities — to the construction of office space. Also under American
influence, the Japanese sought to equip their new office-type and other
buildings with the most advanced facilities and amenities, including ex-
tensive fluorescent lighting and air conditioning. In addition, both in
commercial and industrial construction and in later home building, they
tried where possible to use fireproof materials to modify the traditional
tinderbox character of cities like Tokyo.

The Japanese had always lived in small wooden homes, usually in-
capable of accommodating more than one or two families. Hence the
construction of multistory concrete apartment buildings in the postwar
period constituted a truly revolutionary development in living style for
many urban dwellers in Japan. Although even these more modern apart-
ment homes are exceedingly modest by American standards, the Japa-
nese viewed them as first steps toward achievement of what they per-
ceived as a kind of earthly utopia of informal and leisurely living derived
from the model provided by the United States.

As part of the postwar building boom, architects experienced a renewal
of both self-confidence and pride as Japanese building styles and aes-
thetic values began truly to attract international attention. One of the
leaders in this postwar renewal was Maekawa Kunio, a former student
of Le Corbusier and his Cubist-inspired emphasis on geometric forms
in architectural design. Among Maekawa’s postwar buildings are the
main branch of the Japan Mutual Financing Bank (Nihon Sogo Ginkb,
1952) in Tokyo and the Tokyo International House (Kokusai Bunka
Kaikan, 1955), both of which were awarded the annual prize of the
Japan Architectural Academy.35 But the greatest fame in Japan’s postwar
world of architecture has gone to Tange Kenzo, who began winning
prizes in architectural competitions during the war and later was for a
time associated with Maekawa. Tange’s triumphs include the Hall Dedi-
cated to Peace (Heiwa-ki Kaikan) at Hiroshima and the main Sports
Arena for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics (figs. 71-72). In the same way that
the 1964 Olympics symbolized for many Japanese the true end of the
postwar period and Japan’s resumption of international status and dig-
nity, the Sports Arena represents an important milestone in the country’s
modern architectural history. Far from requiring further tutelage and
inspiration from the West, the Japanese now stand among the leaders in
international architecture, and architecture has become an aspect of Japa-
nese culture that has exerted great influence on the world outside Japan.

It is often said that postwar Japan evolved into a one-and-a-half-party
system. This means that for decades national power was held uninter-
ruptedly by the conservative camp of politicians, who in 1955 merged to
form the Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), and whose opponents in the

Culture in the Present Age

333

left-wing, or progressive, camp (led by the Socialist Party) were during
the same period consistently held to a minority — and thus a permanently
out-of-power — status with no more than one-third of the seats in the
Diet.

As the seemingly permanent rulers of the country, the Liberal-Demo-
cratic Party pursued policies of economic development and intimate
alignment with the United States based on a Mutual Security Pact that
made the former conqueror responsible for Japan’s national defense. The
pact, originally signed in 1950, was a great boon to Japan in enabling it,
unlike other major countries, to limit military spending to a small frac-
tion of its national income. At the same time, the pact at times aroused
intense hostility among some Japanese and even symbolized the love-
hate feelings of Japan for the United States, which derive from the
special kind of relationship that evolved between the two countries after
the war.

An event that was important in restoring some semblance of equality
or at least partnership in relations between the United States and Japan
was the rioting in Tokyo in 1960 over renewal of the Mutual Security
Pact and the consequent cancellation of President Eisenhower’s planned
visit to Japan. The leftist-inspired rioting occurred against a confused
background of Cold War tensions (including the fear that Japan, with
American troops still stationed on its soil, might be the first target of the
Soviets in a nuclear war with the United States), resentment against the
high-handed tactics of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke (1896-1987) in
seeking renewal of the pact, and an ambivalent kind of anti-Americanism.
For the left wing in Japan, the United States was the principal threat to
international peace. A staunch supporter of the conservatives, who were
in power, the United States even advocated amendment of the American-
imposed 1947 Constitution to eliminate the antiwar article and enable
Japan to enter more actively into military association with it. But among
the great majority of the Japanese people the United States was probably
viewed in 1960 in various, sometimes conflicting ways: as a former
enemy, as a humane and beneficent occupier, as an invaluable trading
partner, and as a military colossus within the gates of East Asia.

Although Eisenhower was prevented from visiting Japan and Kishi was
forced out of office, the Mutual Security Pact was renewed for another
ten years and the left-wing opposition was badly fragmented by internal
disputes after the rioting. It is therefore debatable who won the victory
in 1960. At least one significant result of the incident was a stirring, for
the first time in the postwar period, of Japanese nationalism. After a
decade and a half of political passivity caused by feelings of guilt and
humiliation over the war, action had been taken — whether or not it was
fully supported by all of the Japanese people — on a truly national issue,
and the United States as Big Brother had been at least partly rebuffed.

334

Culture in the Present Age

This is not to suggest that 1960 marked the charting of a new course
for Japan or the definition of a new national purpose. Japan was on the
threshold of its decade of greatest material fulfillment, a decade that
propelled its gross national product to third highest in the world. What
started as a “leisure boom” attained the level of an almost undreamed of
prosperity, measured in terms of washing machines, television sets, motor
cars, and overseas travel. At the same time, the Japanese were afflicted
by those apparent inevitabilities of progress: urban sprawl, pollution, and
the psychological tensions and social malaise of the modern condition.

Japan had become a society of mass culture (taishu bunka) by at least
the late 1920s. Newspapers, books, and magazines had achieved huge
circulations; people flocked to department stores and to the movies and
theatres; and radio broadcasts were reaching into households through-
out the country.36 Goods of all kinds were being produced, and advertis-
ing and marketing were geared to stimulate desire for them and encour-
age mass consumption. A decade or so later Japan, like other participants
in World War II, used the tools of mass culture to promote its aims in
what can perhaps be called the first “mass-culture war.”

But mass culture as a medium to foster the production of consumer
goods declined precipitously during the war. Having chosen to fight a
country (the United States) whose economy was some ten times greater
than its own,37 Japan was forced to direct virtually all its wealth and
resources into the war effort. By war’s end, as we have seen, the Japanese
people suffered dire shortages of food, clothing, and the other basic
necessities of everyday life. In that sense, mass culture had ground nearly
to a halt.

As mass culture gradually revived in the postwar period, it was accom-
panied by a substantial “Americanization” of life — at least at the popular
level — because of the pervasive influence of the United States upon
Japan both during and after the Occupation. By about 1955 the Japa-
nese government, having met the basic needs of the people, was able to
set new goals in the production of goods for mass consumption, and
thereupon embarked upon what became known as Japan’s “economic
miracle.” Year after seemingly endless year Japan scored remarkable in-
creases in gross national product. The stages through which this miracle
came to satisfy the desires of Japan’s consumers were neatly categorized
by the coining of a series of slogans that punned irreverently on the im-
perial regalia or “three sacred treasures” of emperorship (mirror, sword,
and jewel). Thus, during the late 1950s the Japanese people sought to
acquire the three S’s of senpuki , sentaku , and suihanki (electric fan,
washing machine, and electric rice cooker); during the 1960s it was the
three C’s of kaay kura , and kara terebi (car, air conditioner, and color
television); and by the 1970s everyone wanted the three J’s of jueru, jetto,
and jutaku (jewels, overseas vacation, and house).38 The period of

Culture in the Present Age

335

phenomenal economic growth finally came to an end in the 1980s, by
which time the Japanese populace had largely obtained all the basic
material treasures of a mass-culture society.

The spread of mass culture tends to standardize tastes and reduce
class distinctions. The Japanese, with their collectivist ethos, are prob-
ably more susceptible than most people to such standardization and to
at least the perception that in recent years class distinctions have been
substantially reduced. Thus polls indicate that an unusually high number
of Japanese — 90 percent or more — regard themselves as middle class. If,
in fact, contemporary Japanese society has become to a high degree
homogenized as “middle class,” the homogenization has been due,
among other things, to a uniform, nationwide educational curriculum;
nearly universal literacy; close to 100 percent ownership of color tele-
vision sets; and the largest per capita circulation of newspapers in the
world.39 Always one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous people,
the Japanese may also have become one of its most homogeneous socially
and culturally.

A major phenomenon in postwar Japan has been the spectacular rise
in the so-called new religions (shinko shukyo ). Although loosely catego-
rized as new, many of the most important of these religions were founded
before the war, some as early as the mid-nineteenth century. But by far
the greatest proliferation of the new religions occurred in the period fol-
lowing World War II. By the end of the Occupation in 1952, for example,
their number was estimated at more than seven hundred, a figure that
prompted one Western scholar to refer to the immediate postwar years
as a time of the “rush hour of the gods.”40

Despite the diversity of the new religions, they share certain general
characteristics. For example, they have tended to spring up during times
of intense crisis or social unrest, such as the early Meiji and post- World
War II periods; their founders have typically been charismatic figures
who have served as vehicles for the revelation of religious truth; they are
highly syncretic, often partaking freely of Shinto and Buddhism, as well
as Christianity;41 and they are millenarian in that they characteristically
promise the advent of a paradise on earth. Also the new religions have
always appealed chiefly to people lower on the social and economic scales:
to those who have in some sense been left behind in the march of modern
progress.

What makes the new religions most fascinating within the larger con-
text of Japanese cultural history is the degree to which they reflect fun-
damental religious values and attitudes that have been held since ancient
times. This can be seen perhaps most tellingly in the kinds of char-
ismatic figures who have founded new religions, the most interesting of
which are the female shamanistic types. Shamanism, as we observed in
Chapter 1, derives from northeast Asia and exerted enormous influence

336

Culture in the Present Age

on early Japanese religion. It centers on belief in the transmission of a
deity’s will through a human intermediary, or shaman. This form of
divine transmission, known in Japanese as kami possession (karni gakari) ,
is vividly described in classical works of literature such as The Tale of
Genji and entails a process whereby, in the face of personal affliction or
natural calamity, the deity believed to be responsible is invited to enter
the body of a medium, usually a girl or woman. Once the deity possesses
her, the medium enters into an ecstatic, sometimes frenzied state and a
voice, clearly not her own, speaks forth to indicate what must be done to
placate the aroused deity.

An excellent example of a modern shaman of this sort is Nakayama
Miki (1798-1887), founder of Tenrikyo, one of the earliest and most
successful of the new religions. A woman of peasant origins (as so many
of the founders have been), Nakayama underwent much suffering and
experienced personal tragedy in her early life: the famines of the late
Tokugawa period, an unhappy marriage, illness and death of her chil-
dren. Then, in 1838, while serving as the medium for ministration to the
leg pains of one of her sons, she was seized by a deity who proclaimed
through her mouth that he was “the true and the original god who has
descended from Heaven to save all mankind.”42 The deity demanded that
Nakayama’s body thenceforth be made available to him.

In addition to becoming the instrument for transmission of divine
revelations by the “true and original god,” Nakayama developed extra-
ordinary powers to heal, and thus entered the tradition of faith healing
that has been a powerful and recurrent feature of Japanese folk religion
throughout history.

Faith healing, as stressed in Tenrikyo and other new religions, is simply
one of a number of concrete promises of personal happiness, material
furfillment, and even entry into an earthly paradise that constitute the
millenarian aspect of those religions. It is also in this millenarianism that
the new religions, otherwise so much within the mainstream of the little
tradition of folk religion in Japan, reveal themselves to be products of the
modern age. Earlier utopian thinking in Japan about life in this world
focused almost invariably on the recapturing or restoration of a golden
age, and thus implicitly rejected existing conditions.43 But the new reli-
gions not only do not reject the modern world, they boast that their fol-
lowers will joyously attain the highest rewards that this world offers. To
dramatize this promise, the more affluent of the new religions have con-
structed lavish national centers — equipped with the most modern luxu-
ries and conveniences — to serve as meccas for visits and pilgrimages of
the faithful and to enable them to sample the paradisiacal sweets con-
jured by their religions. Yet, as Carmen Blacker observes, even in the
building of such meccas there is a harking back to the traditional — in this
case, an attempt to “impose on the present world a kind of mythical or

Culture in the Present Age

337

eschatological geography,”44 much like, for example, the representation
of the Pure Land Buddhist paradise in the Phoenix Hall and garden of
the eleventh-century Byodoin at Uji.

The most important of the new religions— and one of the most
startling religious, social, and political phenomena in postwar Japan— is
Soka Gakkai, the Value Creation Society. Founded in the early 1930s for
the purpose of religious education, Soka Gakkai is a modern outgrowth
of a branch of Nichiren Buddhism. In contrast to most of the new reli-
gions, which are highly syncretic, it shares the exclusivism and intolerance
of other religious sects that have always been the hallmarks of Nichiren
Buddhism.

Soka Gakkai achieved only minor success in prewar days and was even
disbanded when its leaders were jailed during the war because of their
refusal to show reverence to state Shinto. But after the war, under the
dynamic if not fanatical leadership of Toda Josei (1900-1958), the
society enjoyed a phenomenal expansion. Employing such strong-arm,
browbeating methods of proselytizing as shakubnku (breaking and sub-
duing) and seeking to recruit not merely individuals but entire families,
Soka Gakkai claimed a membership by the early 1960s of ten million. In
addition, through its political arm, Komeito (Clean Government Party),
Soka Gakkai went to the polls and established itself as the third largest
force in the upper house of the Japanese Diet.

Soka Gakkai is in many ways a model for realization of the expecta-
tions that have been aroused by the new religions in postwar Japan.
Although intellectuals may shun it and some people may denounce it as
neofascist, Soka Gakkai is one of the greatest mass movements in Japa-
nese history. Along with its vast following, it possesses enormous mate-
rial opulence, observable in its sumptuous center at the foot of Mount
Fuji, which drew more than two million people to its opening in 1958.
The attractions of Soka Gakkai are many. For one thing, it offers people
the opportunity to belong to a great and flourishing movement, an oppor-
tunity that appealed with particular force to the Japanese in the wake of
the widespread social disorientation caused by defeat in war. Soka
Gakkai makes extravagant claims for its power to induce healing through
faith, and even boasts that it can prevent illness. Not content with the
slogan “J°in us and you won’t become sick,” the society has gone so far
as to threaten, “If you don’t join us, you will be sure to get sick.”45

If the resurgence of the new religions since the war has directed addi-
tional attention to the extraordinary group instincts and group orienta-
tion of the Japanese, there has also been much consideration given during
the same period to the matter of individualism in a Japan liberated from
the anti-individualistic fetters of the kokutai ideology7. This is probably
most conspicuous in the writings of such authors as Mishima Yukio, Abe

338

Culture in the Present Age

Kobo, and Oe Kenzaburo (1935- ), who have subjected the individual
to the most intense psychological scrutiny, observing his unlimited poten-
tiality for erratic, perverse, and bizarre behavior and his often desperate
struggle against the dictates of social conformity.

Mishima, who committed suicide by disembowelment in 1970 at the
age of forty-five, was one of the most fascinating individuals— at least to
foreigners — in recent Japanese history.46 A small and sickly youth of upper
middle-class stock (his father was a moderately successful bureaucrat),
Mishima had a most unwholesome childhood under the fanatically pos-
sessive domination of his grandmother, with whom he lived and in whose
bed he slept until age twelve. Quite likely this early experience nourished
the homosexuality that became so central not only to his later social
behavior but also to his artistic vision.

Mishima attended the lustrous Peers School in Tokyo, where he
achieved an outstanding academic record and even received an award
from the hand of the emperor for graduating at the head of his class in
1944. He showed considerable precocity in writing, and although, at the
urging of his father, he attended Tokyo University Law School and began
a career in the Finance Ministry in 1947, he soon abandoned this to
become a full-time author. In 1 949 he vaulted into fame with the publi-
cation of an extraordinary, painfully revealing autobiographical novel
entitled Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no Kokuhaku).

One of Mishima’s purposes in writing Confessions of a Mask was to
debunk the I-novelists, many of whom he believed merely chronicled in
excruciating detail the dullness of their lives without ever really probing
into the dark inner realms of human psychology. Whether or not the I-
novelists as a group were, in fact, guilty of not telling the ultimate truth
about themselves or getting to the roots of their existences, Mishima
himself certainly revealed enough in Confessions of a Mask about his own
emotional essence to explain the main course of his life and even his
manner of death.

The Mishima we see in Confessions of a Mask is a narcissistic young
man powerfully attracted from an early age to such things as the sight
of a night soil man dressed in close-fitting thigh-pullers, the odor of
sweat emanating from soldiers, and the “black thickets” in masculine
armpits. But far more importantly, these homosexual cravings were asso-
ciated with an aesthetic of blood and death.47 This fact is startlingly im-
pressed upon us in the famous passage from Confessions of a Mask wherein
Mishima reveals that he had his first ejaculation upon viewing a repro-
duction of Guido Reni’s painting of Saint Sebastian in which the martyr
is shown tied to a tree, his nearly nude and expiring body pierced with
arrows. The effect on Mishima was immediate and fierce:

That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled

with some pagan joy. My blood soared up; my loins swelled as though in

Culture in the Present Age

339

wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited
my use of it with unprecedented ardor, upbraiding me for my ignorance,
panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion
they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed
to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blind-
ing intoxication.48

The latter part of Confessions of a Mask is devoted to Mishima’s deter-
mined but futile attempt to prove his normality by courting a young lady
named Sonoko. Mishima — or, I should say, the novel's protagonist —
derives no pleasure from physical contact with Sonoko, and when she
falls in love with him, he balks at marriage. Still, they renew their liaison
even after she marries another man and continue until the climactic
scene of the book when they visit a rather sleazy dance hall and he sees
something that strikes him with the force of a “thunderbolt":

He was a youth of twenty-one or -two, with coarse but regular and swarthy
features. He had taken off his shirt and stood there half naked, rewinding a
belly-band about his middle. The coarse cotton material was soaked with
sweat and had become a light-gray color. He seemed to be intentionally
dawdling over his task of winding and was constantly joining in the talk and
laughter of his companions. His naked chest showed bulging muscles, fully
developed and tensely knit; a deep cleft ran down between the solid muscles
of his chest toward his abdomen. The thick, fetter-like sinews of his flesh
narrowed down from different directions to the sides of his chest, where they
interlocked in tight coils. The hot mass of his smooth torso was being severely
and tightly imprisoned by each succeeding turn of the soiled cotton belly-
band. His bare, sun-tanned shoulders gleamed as though covered with oil.
And black tufts stuck out from the cracks of his armpits, catching the sunlight,
curling and glittering with glints of gold.

At this sight, above all at the sight of the peony tattoood on his hard chest,
I was beset by sexual desire. My fervent gaze was fixed upon that rough and
savage, but incomparably beautiful body. Its owner was laughing there under
the sun. When he threw back his head I could see his thick, muscular neck. A
strange shudder ran through my innermost heart. I could no longer take my
eyes off him.

I had forgotten Sonoko ’s existence. I was thinking of but one thing: Of his
going out into the streets of high summer just as he was, half-naked, and get-
ting into a fight with a rival gang. Of a sharp dagger cutting through that
belly-band, piercing that torso. Of that soiled belly-band beautifully dyed with
blood. Of his gory corpse being put on an improvised stretcher, made of a
window shutter, and brought back here.49

Mishima, at about twenty-three, fantasized a death for the young man
in the dance hall that was the one he chose for himself some twenty-
two years later. It may well be, as Masao Miyoshi hypothesizes,50 that
Mishima’s adult life was dominated by a longing for the death he felt he
was denied during the war when he failed the physical examination for
induction into the army and when all the American bombs missed him.

340

Culture in the Present Age

But it is clear in retrospect that he needed much time to prepare both
mentally and physically for what he envisioned as the aesthetically
perfect form of self-destruction. In the mid-1950s he took up body-
building, and during the radicalism of the 1960s, which accompanied
the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War, he assumed
an extreme right-wing political stance based on traditional reverence for
the emperor. Mishima transformed himself into a modern-day samurai,
a warrior of pure spirit who would think only of one thing: “a sharp
dagger . . . piercing [his] torso.”

Mishima was a disciplined and prolific writer, producing more than
thirty novels and many plays and essays. His output is striking not only
for its quantity but also for its thematic diversity. Nevertheless, the
Mishima that matters — the Mishima driven by an aesthetic of death as
both the ultimate sexual experience and the supreme realization of beauty
— is fully adumbrated in Confessions of a Mask. In his subsequent writing,
Mishima gave probably the most artistic and memorable expression to
this aesthetic in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji). Published
serially in 1956, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion was inspired by the
burning six years earlier of the fourteenth-century Golden Pavilion (or
Temple) by an unbalanced Zen acolyte. The acolyte of Mishima’s novel,
Mizoguchi, is a young man, rendered inarticulate by a stutter, who
enters into the service of the Golden Pavilion during World War II.
When he had first been shown the Pavilion by his father on a visit to
Kyoto, Mizaguchi had been disappointed to discover that it was “merely
a small, dark, old, three-storied building.” But after he returned home
he found that

the Golden Temple, which had disappointed me so greatly at first sight,
began to revivify its beauty within me day after day, until in the end it became
a more beautiful Golden Temple than it had been before I saw it. I could not
say wherein this beauty lay. It seemed that what had been nurtured in my
dreams had become real and could now, in turn, serve as an impulse for fur-
ther dreams.

Now I no longer pursued the illusion of a Golden Temple in nature and in
the objects that surrounded me. Gradually the Golden Temple came to exist
more deeply and more solidly within me.51

Mizoguchi fixes on the Golden Pavilion as an ideal of externalized beauty
and, at the same time, identifies it with the beauty he feels within him-
self but cannot bring out because of his speech impediment. All goes
reasonably well as long as the war continues, because the danger of the
Pavilion’s possible destruction by bombing balances Mizoguchi’s always
threatened interior world of beauty. But, when the war ends, there is an
abrupt and terrible change in the relationship between the building and
the acolyte:

Culture in the Present Age

341

. . . from the moment that I set eyes on the temple that day [of surrender], I
could feel that “our” relationship had already undergone a change. When it
came to such things as the shock of defeat or national grief, the Golden
Temple was in its element; at such times it was transcendent, or at least pre-
tended to be transcendent. Until today, the Golden Temple had not been like
this. Without doubt the fact that it had in the end escaped being burned
down in an air raid and was now out of danger had served to restore its earlier
expression, an expression that said: “I have been here since olden times and I
shall remain here forever.” . . .

The most peculiar thing was that of all the various times when the Golden
Temple had shown me its beauty, this time was the most beautiful of all.
Never had the temple displayed so hard a beauty — a beauty that transcended
my own image, yes, that transcended the entire world of reality, a beauty that
bore no relation to any form of evanescence! Never before had its beauty
shone like this, rejecting every sort of meaning.

It is no exaggeration to say that, as I gazed at the temple, my legs trembled
and my forehead was covered with cold beads of perspiration. On a former
occasion when I had returned to the country after seeing the temple, its vari-
ous parts and its whole structure had resounded with a sort of musical har-
mony. But what I heard this time was complete silence, complete noiseless-
ness. Nothing flowed there, nothing changed. The Golden Temple stood
before me, towered before me, like some terrifying pause in a piece of music,
like some resonant silence.

“The bond between the Golden Temple and myself has been cut,” I
thought. “Now my vision that the Golden Temple and I were living in the
same world has broken down. Now I shall return to my previous condition,
but it will be even more hopeless than before. A condition in which I exist on
one side and beauty on the other. A condition that will never improve so long
as this world endures.”52

Thus Mizoguchi embarks on the line of thinking that leads to the con-
clusion that he must destroy the Golden Pavilion in order to live. In this
application of Mishima’s aesthetic, it is the Golden Pavilion as the em-
bodiment of the highest beauty (in contrast to the beauty that Mizogu-
chi imagines is within him) that must “die” to realize its finest potential.

Mishima committed suicide with another member of his private army,
known as the Shield Society (Tate no Kai), on November 25, 1970, at
the headquarters of the Japan Self-Defense Force in Tokyo after exhort-
ing a hastily assembled group of its members to join him in smashing
the liberal postwar constitutional structure and restoring, in the name of
the emperor, a Japan of “true men and samurai.”53 It is difficult to take
seriously the radically right-wing politics Mishima espoused in his last
years, especially in view of the fact that for most of his life he had been
notably apolitical. It seems far more likely, as suggested earlier, that he
conceived these politics as a necessary part of the staging for the glori-
ous and beautiful death he so ardently desired. Also part of the staging
was delivery to his publisher on the day he had chosen to die of the final

342

Culture in the Present Age

installment of his last novel, the massive tetralogy entitled The Sea of
Fertility . Set in the twentieth century and based on the theme of reincar-
nation through several generations of the soul of a young Japanese aris-
tocrat, The Sea of Fertility was obviously intended by Mishima to con-
firm his stature as one of the world’s great writers. But to many critics it
confirms, instead, the sad fact that Mishima’s best writing had been
done years earlier. As Marleigh Ryan observes, “In [the tetralogy’s] more
than 1,400 pages of plots and subplots, births and rebirths, violence and
sickness, we have a repetition of virtually every theme Mishima used in
his earlier novels. From peepholes to ritual suicide, we have been through
it all before, and we remain curiously unmoved.”54

Mishima’s delvings into the wellsprings of human behavior was char-
acteristically Japanese at least insofar as he limited himself generally to
the particularities of his own psyche (however abnormal) as the only
source of true experience. Abe Kobo, on the other hand, transcended
this particularism of so many Japanese writers and dealt more univer-
sally with the self of modern man. A writer of enormous imaginative
power — much influenced by Kafka — who wove his bizarre tales as para-
bles on the plight of contemporary existence, Abe was preoccupied with
the themes of personal freedom, the urge to attain it, and the equally
powerful urge to prevent or escape from it. In The Ruined Map ( Moetsu -
kit a Chizu, 1967), for example, his hero is a private detective investigat-
ing a man’s disappearance, who eventually confuses his own identity with
that of the man he is seeking. The cause of this confusion is suggested in
the following dialogue the detective has with a possible witness to the
disappearance. Hie witness speaks first:

“Why does the world take it for granted that there’s a right to pursue people?
Someone who hasn’t committed any crime. I can’t understand how you can
assume, as if it were a matter of course, that there is some right that lets you
seize a man who has gone off of his own free will.”

“By the same reasoning the one left behind might insist that there was no
right to go away.”

“Going off is not a right but a question of will.”

“Maybe pursuit is a matter of will too.”

“Then, I’m neutral. I don’t want to be anyone’s friend or enemy.”55

Abe seems to be telling us that some people will always try to escape
from the restraints of society and their humdrum existences and that
others will just as surely pursue them and attempt to entrap them again.
Pursuer and pursued are likely to be motivated by the same force of will
and, in their special relationship, may indeed appear to be very similar,
if not identical.

Abe’s concern was with freedom not as an intellectual ideal but as an
emotional craving. The paradox of his message is that freedom, once

Culture in the Present Age

343

achieved, may incite the same desire to escape as did one's previous state
of real or imagined captivity. Abe’s finest statement of this paradox is
The Woman in the Dunes ( Suna no Onna, 1962). Like The Ruined Map, it
commences with the disappearance of a man, in this case a nondescript
schoolteacher who is an amateur entomologist going on a holiday to the
seaside in quest of bugs. The man can be seen both as a pursuer of bugs
(who possess freedom) and as one who yearns for freedom in his fasci-
nation with sand, the natural habitat of the bugs he pursues. No other
substance — except water, to which Abe frequently compares it — so clearly
represents both freedom and its potential denial. Forever free itself, as it
constantly shifts and flows, sand can also relentlessly pursue and totally
engulf.

Missing the last bus home, the man accepts shelter for the night in a
nearby village, only to discover the following day that he is a prisoner.
He has been placed in a house in a deep sand pit to live with a recently
widowed but still young woman. Together they constitute one of a score
of enslaved families in pits facing the sea that must constantly dig sand
to prevent it from inundating the village. Much of The Woman in the
Dunes is a narrative of the man’s schemes and efforts to escape to free-
dom, but on another level it is the story of how the man, forced into
confinement in the microcosmic world of the sand pit, comes to realize
the futility for most people of regarding life — whether in his kind of cap-
tivity or in society beyond it — as anything other than a pit, a place where
freedom is stifled. Some people may think they have round-trip tickets
that enable them to come and go as they please, but they need all the
strength and will they possess to avoid losing the return halves of their
tickets and being forced onto the one-way track that entraps everyone
else:

Got a one-way ticket to the blues , woo, woo . . . .

If you want to sing it, sing it. These days people caught in the clutches of
the one-way ticket never sing it like that. The soles of those who have a one-
way ticket are so thin that they scream when they step on a pebble. They have
had their fill of walking. “The Round-Trip Ticket Blues” is what they want to
sing. A one-way ticket is a disjointed life that misses the links between yester-
day and today, today and tomorrow. Only the man who obstinately hangs on
to a round-trip ticket can hum with real sorrow a song of a one-way ticket.
For this very reason he grows desperate lest the return half of his ticket be
lost or stolen; he buys stocks, signs up for life insurance, and talks out of dif-
ferent sides of his mouth to his union pals and his superiors. He hums “The
One-Way Ticket Blues” with all his might and, choosing a channel at ran-
dom, turns the television up to full volume in an attempt to drown out the
peevish voices of those who have only a one-way ticket and who keep asking
for help, voices that come up through the bathtub drain or the toilet hole. It
would not be strange at all if “The Round-Trip Ticket Blues” were the song
of mankind imprisoned.56

344

Culture in the Present Age

After a futile and humiliating attempt to escape from the pit, the man
sets about constructing a ground trap in the hope of ensnaring a crow to
carry his plea for help to the outside world. The trap project has little
chance of succeeding, but it leads the man to an incredible discovery:
beneath the sand there is water that could be invaluable to the villagers.
With this secret knowledge about the water, the man’s attitude toward
his situation begins to change, and when shortly thereafter the villagers
forget or neglect to remove the rope ladder leading to the bottom of the
pit, he does not seize the opportunity to make another attempt to
escape. For now he has a “two-way ticket” to life and can afford to weigh
his options more carefully:

There was no particular need to hurry about escaping. On the two-way ticket
he held in his hand now, the destination and time of departure were blanks
for him to fill in as he wished. In addition, he realized that he was bursting
with a desire to talk to someone about the water trap. And if he wanted to
talk about it, there wouldn’t be better listeners than the villagers. He would
end by telling someone^if not today, then tomorrow.

He might as well put off his escape until sometime after that.57

The themes of freedom and escape from the fetters of modern society’
are important also in the work of Oe Kenzaburo, although Oe presents
the issue more clearly as that of alienation and anomie. In Oe’s typical
schema, the individual is caught in a society that makes stifling demands
upon him, demands that he cannot meet and that, therefore, render him
a failure, at least in his own mind. Compounding the personal alienation
and fear that he is going nowhere in life is the more widely shared social
malaise of anomie that sees no direction in the life of society as a whole
(that is, postwar Japan, the home of economic animals who have poured
their souls into the transistor radio).

Such an individual — held in the grip of alienation and anomie — is
Bird, the hero of Oe’s A Personal Matter ( Kojinteki na Taiken , 1964), a
novel startlingly similar in conception and plot to John Updike’s Rabbity
Run. As the story begins, we find Bird at age twenty-seven, married and
awaiting the birth of his first child. We learn how he was drunk for four
weeks after his marriage two years earlier, how he had to withdraw from
graduate school, and how he subsequently turned to his father-in-law to
obtain an unpretentious job as teacher in a college-preparatory cram
school. Bird dreams of going to Africa and has just bought a set of
Michelin road maps of the distant continent. Wandering the streets while
waiting for news of his wife from the hospital, Bird is attacked by a gang
of dragon-jacketed hoods and is beaten to the ground:

It occurred to Bird that the maps must be getting creased between his body
and the ground. And his own child was being born: the thought danced with
new poignancy to the frontlines of consciousness. A sudden rage took him,

Culture in the Present Age

345

and rough despair. Until now, out of terror and bewilderment, Bird had been
contriving only to escape. But he had no intention of running now. If I don’t
fight now, I’ll not only lose the chance to go to Africa forever, my baby will be
born into the world solely to lead the worst possible life — it was like the voice
of inspiration, and Bird believed.58

Bird counterattacks and “the joy of battle . . . reawakened in him; it had
been years since he had felt it. Bird and the dragon-jackets watched one
another without moving, appraising the formidable enemy. Time passed,”
and the gang withdrew.

Bird, trapped and bewildered by life, sees in the dragon-jacketed gang
a well-defined enemy he can attack, daringly and against great odds. But
the euphoria he experiences over victory in physical battle is short-lived,
and the oppressiveness of life becomes even more terrifyingly real when
he learns that his baby has been born a monster with a rare brain hernia
protruding from its head. Africa suddenly becomes more unattainable
than ever before, and Bird tries to escape from the dilemma of what to
do about the baby by fleeing in a totally opposite direction. Purchasing a
bottle of whiskey, he seeks sanctuary — in a symbolic kind of return to
the womb — in the dark, cluttered apartment of a former girlfriend. Later,
when the baby fails to die in the hospital as Bird had agonizingly hoped,
he and the girlfriend take custody of it and deliver it to an illicit doctor
for disposal. With the baby gone, they plan to fulfill Bird’s dream of
going to Africa.

Oe had to this point written a splendid and poignantly moving story.
Inexplicably, he chose to conclude it with a brief, less than convincing
epilogue that informs us that Bird came to his senses in time to retrieve
the baby and return it to the hospital, where it was operated on and
fixed — it did not have a brain hernia after all, merely a benign tumor.
Bird’s attitude is now mature and stable, and he is planning for the future
of the baby.

In 1 994 Oe became the second Japanese writer, after Kawabata Yasu-
nari, to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Playing on the title that
Kawabata had used for his 1968 Nobel acceptance speech, “Japan the
Beautiful and Myself,” Oe entitled his speech “Japan the Ambiguous
and Myself.” Oe observed that Kawabata, in the twilight of his career,
had been able to reaffirm his faith in the traditional literary and aesthetic
values of Japan and, in particular, in the spirit of Zen Buddhism. In his
own writing, however, Oe found himself torn by what he saw as the
“ambiguity” between Japan the traditional and Japan the modern. As he
put it:

After a hundred and twenty years of modernization since the opening up of
the country, contemporary Japan is split between two opposite poles of ambi-
guity. This ambiguity, which is so powerful and penetrating that it divides

346

Culture in the Present Age

both the state and its people, and affects me as a writer like a deep-felt scar, is
evident in various ways. The modernization of Japan was oriented toward
learning from and imitating the West, yet the country is situated in Asia and
has firmly maintained its traditional culture. The ambiguous orientation of
Japan drove the country into the position of an invader in Asia, and resulted
in its isolation from other Asian nations not only politically but also socially
and culturally. And even in the West, to which its culture was supposedly
quite open, it has long remained inscrutable or only partially understood.^

One of the most remarkable phenomena of postwar mass (popular)
culture has been the boom in comics (manga). In the United States the
popularity of printed comics has declined steadily since the 1950s largely
because of the competition from television. But in Japan, which, like the
United States, has also become one of the world’s most television-satu-
rated countries, comics of the “story-line” kind have during the same
period exploded in popularity to the point where, in 1980, 27 percent —
or 1.8 billion — of the books and magazines published in Japan were
comics. 60 But what is perhaps even more astounding than the sheer
volume of comics publications is that comics are voraciously read by
adults as well as youngsters. Thus, for example, to the great surprise of
many foreign visitors, it is not at all uncommon to see well-dressed busi-
nessmen riding the subway thoroughly and unself-consciously engrossed
in reading comic books.

Japan has a comics tradition, especially in caricature, dating back to
ancient times. As noted in Chapter 4, caricature-like sketches can be
found on the walls of Horyuji Temple and in the collection of docu-
ments in the Shosoin storehouse of the Nara period. These sketches ap-
pear to have provided at least some of the inspiration for the drawing of
probably the most famous caricatures of premodern Japanese history,
the Animal Scrolls attributed to the priest Toba (see figs. 28-29). In the
Tokugawa period, Hokusai is especially remembered for his caricatures
and comical sketches and stylistically can probably be regarded as the
father of modern Japanese comics. Hokusai is also credited with coining
the word manga, which is still used today for comics.

One of the most popular subjects of postwar comics has been science
fiction. Another has been the samurai, Japan’s equivalent, in terms of
manly ethos, of the American cowboy. But the Japanese have never
developed the kind of “war comics” that have been so popular in the
United States. Even during World War II, neither comics nor movies
portrayed the Japanese soldier, for example, as a tough he-man out to
slaughter the enemy. Rather, the focus was more on relations among
soldiers bonded by battle and on the simple and pure way they fought
for their country and sometimes died for it.61 Since the war, for fairly
obvious reasons, Japanese artists of comics and other media have made
no attempt to glorify war. On the contrary, some have drawn antiwar

Culture in the Present Age

347

comics while others have given their attention to the sad plight of
the civilian in a war-devastated Japan. Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen
(Barefoot Gen), for example, tells the story of a boy named Gen in
Hiroshima on the day the first atomic bomb was dropped.62 “Unaware
of the hell that was approaching in the sky, Hiroshima began the day as
usual.” Gen, setting out for school, is stopped by a lady who asks him
where a certain class is to be held. As he starts to answer, Gen notices a
single B-29 in the sky and wonders why the sirens have not sounded.
Within seconds the bomb plummets and “like a wind from hell, the
atomic cloud roared up six miles into the sky over Hiroshima . . . and in
the city, time stopped.”

Gen, dazed, pulls himself out of the rubble. The body of the lady is
nearby, her face melted almost beyond recognition. As Gen runs through
the flattened city calling for his father, mother (who is pregnant), sister,
and brother, the people he sees “look like monsters.” At last he finds
what used to be his house. His mother kneels beside it, but his father,
sister, and brother are trapped beneath the collapsed roof. Gen and his
mother try desperately to pry the roof up with pieces of timber, but
before they can succeed the house is engulfed by a fire sweeping through
the city. The mother screams that she wants to die with her husband and
other children, but Gen drags her away and “as they escape the flames,
Gen’s mother goes into labor, and with no one to help them, they bring
a new life into the dying city.” In the last frames the mother, holding the
baby aloft, implores her, “When you grow up you must never let this
happen again!”

For a country that has one of the lowest rates of violence and crime in
the world, Japan produces many comics that depict acts of extreme vio-
lence, including scenes of almost unmatchable blood and gore. Frederik
Schodt describes one comic, for example, that depicts suffering peasants
in the medieval age and that features “heads rolling, eyes gouged out,
and showers of blood (created by soaking a brush in ink and then blow-
ing on it).”63 And for a country that is puritanical in regard to sex and
pornography, Japan tolerates a remarkable amount of sex of all kinds in
its comics. Artists are not allowed to draw explicit sexual acts but,
limited only by their imaginations and their skill with the brush, they are
able to craft scenes of both “normal” and deviant sexual activities that
leave very little to readers’ imaginations.

Erotic art has a long tradition in Japan. Woodblock artists in the Toku-
gawa period, for example, produced great quantities of erotic prints,
called “spring pictures” ( shunga )y that are fully explicit and show men
and women in every conceivable — and some inconceivable — position of
intimacy. Some prints depict people with oversized sexual organs; others
show them engaged in sex with animals. In Japan today, public display
of spring pictures is generally suppressed. But the spirit of spring pic-

348

Culture in the Present Age

tures lives on in the work of the many manga artists who have been influ-
enced by them.

Science fiction, violent action, samurai stories, sports — these are
among the standard fare of boys’ comics. Although recently some of this
fare has also been served up to girls, the style and subject matter of girls’
comics have always differed greatly from those of boys. At one time,
girls’ comics (whose artists now are almost all women) were concerned
exclusively with romance and love, and these subjects remain the basis
for nearly all comics for girls. In girls’ comics the main characters are
always depicted as young, with pretty, innocent faces, and huge, dreamy
eyes. Many look more Caucasian than Japanese (the West being viewed
in this regard as a place of romance), and they live in a total fantasy
world to which Japanese girls appear to be especially attracted because
the customs and mores of their country have kept them largely segre-
gated from boys through at least the teen years.

In girls’ comics, in particular, homosexuality, bisexuality, and cross-
dressing are common, and boys and girls are often, if not usually, androg-
ynously portrayed. A taste for the androgynous has deep roots in Japa-
nese culture. This stems at least in part from the fact that the traditional
clothing of men and women — the kimono in its various forms — has often
been similar if not identical. In many Tokugawa-period woodblock prints,
for example, men and women are dressed exactly alike. Frequently their
faces are also drawn in identically conventionalized form, and sometimes
even their hairdos are the same. Although usually the top of a man’s
head is shaved, and thus distinct from a woman’s, there are pictures of
young men (without shaved pates) and women who cannot be distin-
guished one from another. In some spring pictures, for example, we find
young men and women making love whose sex can be identified only by
their genitalia.

Cross-dressing and at least the suggestion of homosexuality or bisex-
uality have been common in Japanese theatre from at least the time of
kabuki in the Tokugawa period. In the all-male kabuki , the actor playing
the part of onnagata or female impersonator represents idealized woman-
hood. Some onnagata in earlier times remained cross-dressing imper-
sonators even in their private lives; and it has often been contended, as
noted in Chapter 7, that the onnagata' s specialized style of femininity
cannot be matched even by real women. In the all-female Takarazuka
Revue of the twentieth century, as we saw in the last chapter, women
cross-dress to play men’s roles, and often are the acknowledged stars of
Takarazuka. The Takarazuka audiences are composed mostly of teen-
age girls, and it is not uncommon for them to form “crushes” on the
male impersonators. Parents do not necessarily object to their daughters
having these crushes or regard them as lesbianism. As Antonia Levi puts
it, “[M]any parents consider it nicer, ‘purer’ if the first object of a young
girl’s affection is female rather than male.”64

Culture in the Present Age

349

Boys portrayed in girls’ comics are almost always feminine in appear-
ance or at least androgynously like girls. Sometimes the boys are homo-
sexually drawn to each other and make love. But in the same way that
the attraction of teenage girls to the male impersonators of the Takara-
zuka Revue is not necessarily regarded as lesbianism, this kind of love-
making of boys in comics is not thought to be real homosexuality. The
boys are engaged in a “pure,” highly aestheticized form of love that tran-
scends the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality.

In the late 1980s a young writer with the curious pen name of Yoshi-
moto Banana (1964- ) appeared on the literary scene like a meteor. Her
novels and novellas were immediately and enormously popular. Some
have been awarded high literary prizes, and several, including Kitchen ,
TV../?, and Lizard, have already been translated into English. Yoshimoto
Banana is unquestionably a cultural phenomenon. But what makes her
particularly unusual is that she emerged from the world of pop culture.
Indeed, she herself says that she was inspired to become a writer by the
comics.

Although many critics have lavishly praised Yoshimoto, some have not
known what to make of her. Should she be regarded as a writer of
“serious literature,” or should she be considered the producer of works
that, like the other artifacts of pop culture, are meant to be “consumed”?
Yoshimoto herself has confused the issue by saying that whenever she
publishes a new novel, she wants copies of her other works to be removed
from the booksellers’ shelves.65

Yoshimoto writes of a world quite at variance with what has long been
perceived as “traditional Japan”: that is, a place of tight social organiza-
tion (beginning with the nuclear family), a powerful work ethic, and
firmly established institutions. In Yoshimoto’s books, virtually nothing is
said about social organization, work ethic, or institutions. Most of the
main characters have no meaningful family ties or are members of artifi-
cially constructed or dysfunctional families, and often they have little or
no occupational motivation. They seem to float rudderless through life,
frequently yearning for love but fearful they will not find it and that their
lives will, instead, be a series of despairing, lonely days. Death is a
persistent theme. People are left alone by the deaths — sometimes violent
deaths — of family members, lovers, and friends. Mikage, the principal
character in Kitchen , for example, reflects on how death and fate have
treated her as she tries to absorb the shock of the news that the person
she had come to regard as a surrogate mother has been brutally
murdered:

When my parents died I was still a child. When my grandfather died, I had a
boyfriend. When my grandmother died I was left all alone. But never had I
felt so alone as I did now.

350

Culture in the Present Age

From the bottom of my heart, I wanted to give up; I wanted to give up on
living. There was no denying that tomorrow would come, and the day after
tomorrow, and so next week, too. I never thought it would be this hard, but I
would go on living in the midst of a gloomy depression, and that made me
feel sick to the depths of my soul. In spite of the tempest raging within me, I
walked the night path calmly.66

Mikage’s surrogate ‘‘mother,” Erico, is in fact a cross-dressing, trans-
sexual man. She is the real father and ersatz mother of Yuichi, who be-
friends Mikage when her grandmother and sole remaining relative dies
and has her move in with him and Erico. The three — Erico, Yuichi, and
Mikage — form a congenial but rather strange family. The relationship
between Mikage and Yuichi, which is the central story of Kitchen , is
ambiguous. For most of the book they appear to behave like brother and
sister, and there is no suggestion of romantic attraction. They seem,
indeed, to be like some of the androgynously similar but essentially sex-
less characters who appear in girls1 comics.

Erico, who works in a gay bar, is stabbed to death by a crazed patron
who at first thought she was a real woman. Proving her physical prowess,
Erico manages to club her attacker to death even as she is dying. But
Erico’s death destroys the “family” and ruptures the already fragile emo-
tional structure supporting the lives of Mikage and Yuichi. Yuichi will
probably muddle on. But we fear that Mikage, devastated by the loss of
Erico and burdened with a morbid, despairing outlook on life, will fare
worse. There is within Mikage, however, a powerful survivalist instinct
that emerges even when her thoughts are the darkest: “Always defeated
— defeated we make dinner, we eat, we sleep. Everyone we love is dying.
Still, to cease living is unacceptable.”67

It is at this point that Mikage finds strength and the purpose to go on
in her long-professed love of kitchens. In the opening lines of Kitcheny
Mikage informs us, “The place I like best in this world is the kitchen.”
Her grandmother has just died and “now only the kitchen and I are left.
It’s just a little nicer than being all alone.” A moment later she states,
more emphatically, “I often think that when it comes time to die, I want
to breathe my last in a kitchen.”68 Acting upon this kitchen fixation,
Mikage takes up cooking and becomes an assistant to a cooking teacher.
With a job and newly found purpose, she realizes — suddenly and intui-
tively— that she also wants to continue to be with Yuichi, and at Kitchen's
end it appears that the two will remain together. Yet even at this stage
there is scarcely a hint of real sexual attraction or romanticism. In a world
where there is constant death and loss and where loneliness always
threatens, Mikage and Yuichi seem more than content to settle for com-
panionship.

Even as Yoshimoto Banana skyrocketed to fame as a writer and
“Banana-mania” swept the country in the late 1980s and the early 1990s,

Culture in the Present Age

351

Japan was undergoing major changes. The postwar “economic miracle”
that had propelled Japan’s economy to number three and then to number
two in the world came to an end before the 1980s were over, and Japan
slipped into a recession that lasted throughout the 1990s. Politically, the
era of the one-and-a-half-party system, which kept the Liberal-Demo-
cratic Party in power for nearly four decades, also ended when the LDP,
rocked by a steady stream of scandals, was forced to relinquish the office
of prime minister in 1993 to an opposition leader at the head of a coali-
tion government. But this transference of power proved no solution to
either Japan’s economic or political problems. Prime ministers came and
went frequently during the 1990s, and the Japanese government failed
to convince many in Japan or elsewhere that it had either the political
will or the policies to lift the country out of a chronic recession caused in
large part by bad loans overseas and a banking system that partly
collapsed under the weight of them. In the euphoric days of the eco-
nomic miracle it was even suggested that the twenty-first century would
be a “Japanese century.” That seems like a distant dream now, as Japan
enters the new century with more problems than prospects.

If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within
the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in
premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless
retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means
of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign bor-
rowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.

But the Japanese have also exported their own culture in modern
times, and in the process have exerted a great influence on world art and
fashion. Exhibitions of arts and crafts, ranging from ancient Buddhist
statuary and paintings to the utensils of the tea ceremony and signs used
by merchants in the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, have drawn large
crowds in the United States and other countries. Touring theatrical
groups performing plays from the puppet and kabuki theatres are peren-
nially popular abroad. Japanese tastes in architecture, interior decoration,
and garden design are known and imitated throughout the world; and
Japanese designers such as Ise Miyake and Hanae Mori have ascended
to high levels in the field of women’s fashion. Clearly, major aspects of
Japanese culture have become an important and vital part of the lives of
people everywhere.

This page intentionally I eft blank

Notes

Chapter 1 The Emergence of Japanese Civilization

1. Keiji Imamura, Prehistoric Japan, p. 26.

2. Scholars continue to debate how rice got to Japan: From south China? From
central China? Via the Korean peninsula? See ibid., pp. 130-31.

3. Even more recently, some scholars have hypothesized that this “cultural trans-
formation” was accompanied by a great influx of people from the continent over a
long period of time. One scholar, for example, estimates that several million people
entered Japan during the thousand years following commencement of the Yayoi
period. Ibid., p. 155.

4. Quoted in Ryusaku Tsunoda, William T. deBary, and Donald Keene, eds.,
Sources of Japanese Tradition , p. 8.

5. Quoted in Agency for Cultural Affairs, ed., Japanese Religion , pp. 37-38.

6. W. G. Aston, tr., Nihongi , p. 77.

7. They calculated in Chinese-style units of sixty-year periods.

8. See Gari Ledyard, “Galloping Along with the Horseriders: Looking for the
Founders of Japan.”

9. Walter Edwards, “Event and Process in the Founding of Japan: The Horse-
rider Theory in Archaeological Perspective.”

10. Many scholars, especially Korean historians, insist that Mimana, which was
supposedly in the territory the Koreans called Kaya, never existed: in other words,
Japan did not establish a territorial enclave in Korea during this early age.

1 1. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 9-1 1.

Chapter 2 The Introduction of Buddhism

1. This date appears in Nihon Shoki, Other sources give 538 as the year of the
“official” introduction of Buddhism to Japan.

2. Another term for Hinayana is Theravada, “Doctrine of the Elders.”

3. A translation of the Constitution can be found in Tsunoda, deBary, and Keane,
Sources of Japanese Tradition , pp. 50-53. The quotations here are from this translation.

4. Another term for this form of poetry is tanka or “short poem.”

5. Donald Keene, ed., Anthology of Japanese Literature , pp. 37-38.

6. Ibid., pp. 46-47.

7. Ibid., pp. 51 52.

8. Donald Keene, tr., Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, p. 7.

9. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature , p. 80.

Chapter 3 The Court at Its Zenith

1. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 122.

2. G. B. Sansom, Japan, A Short Cultural History , p. 228.

354

Notes to Pages 51-95

3. There are two forms of kana : kaiakana and hiragana. Hiragana is the principal
form used, along with Chinese characters, in writing Japanese. Use of katakana is
restricted primarily to the phonetic reproduction of foreign words and names, and to
printing on public signs and the like.

4. There were two titles for regent: sesshd for a minor emperor and kampaku for an
emperor who had reached his majority.

5. A mission was planned for 894 but was never dispatched.

6. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature , p. 80.

7. Quoted in Earl Miner, ed., Japanese Poetic Diaries , p. 26.

8. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, p. 76.

9. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition , p. 180.

10. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature , pp. 90-91.

11. Ibid., p. 82.

12. Edward Seidensticker, tr., The Gossamer Years, p. 167.

13. Keene, Anthology > of Japanese Literature , pp. 67-68.

14. Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, translated by Arthur Waley, pp. 22-23.

15. Ivan Morris, tr., The Pillow Book , 1:7-8.

16. Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, translated by Edward Seidensticker, 1:437.

17. William and Helen McCullough, trs .,A Tale of Flowering Fortunes, 2:515-16.

18. The chronological and annals and biographies forms of organizing history de-
rived from China. An annals and biographies history was basically a topically, rather
than a chronologically, arranged work. The two principal topics were the annals of
emperors and the biographies of court ministers and other prominent people.

19. Helen McCullough, tr., Okagami, p. 208.

20. Namu Amida Butsu or “Hail Amida Buddha!”

21. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, pp. 202-3.

Chapter 4 The Advent of a New Age

1. The term “samurai,” although generally used today when speaking of Japan’s
premodern warriors, was in early times only one designation among many for these
fighting men. Probably the most common term was tsmvamono; another was bushi,
which means something like “military gentry.”

2. Taira (also known as Heike) and Minamoto (also known as Genji) were two
surnames given to princes who were excluded from the imperial family in a process
of “dynastic shedding” that was used periodically to reduce the family’s considerable
size. The imperial family itself has no surname.

3. The wars are known as the Former Nine Years War, 1056-62, and the Later
Three Years War, 1083-87. Both wTars have misleading designations, since the first
lasted six years and the second, four.

4. This struggle is also known as the Gempei War, a designation derived from the
gen of Genji (Minamoto) and the hei (changed phonetically to pei ) of Heike (Taira).

5. This war tale is called Shomonki or Masakado-ki.

6. Cited in Paul Varley, Warriors of Japan, As Portrayed in the War Tales, p. 85.

7. Cited in Paul Varley, “Warriors as Courtiers: The Taira in Heike Monogatari”
in Amy Heinrich, ed., Currents in Japanese Culture, p. 62.

8. The Kakuichi version, compiled in 1371.

Chapter 5 The Canons of Medieval Taste

1 . Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, p. 197.

2. William R. LaFleur, The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in
Medieval Japan, pp. 60-79.

3. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, pp. 206-7.

4. Ibid., pp. 195-96.

Notes to Pages 96-145

355

5. Robert Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry , p. 245.

6. Quoted in Earl Miner, Art Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry, p. 102.

7. From the Shinkokinshu in Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature , p. 194.

8. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 193.

9. Hojo Masako (1 157-1225) was Yoritomo’s wife.

10. Later in the century imperial princes were substituted for the Fujiwara.

1 1. The former emperor was Gotoba (1180-1239), and the brief conflict became
known as the Jokyu War.

12. Sansom, Japan, A Short Cultural History, p. 334.

13. Ibid.

14. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 219.

15. Ibid., p. 234.

16. Heinrich Dumoulin, A History of Zen Buddhism, p. 1 26.

17. Some scholars contend that the storm of 1274 was not a typhoon inasmuch as
it occurred in November, after the typhoon season.

18. Quoted in William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors, p. 331 .

19. Quoted in Varley, Warriors of Japan, p. 183.

20. Kamikaze pilots often wore headbands (hachimaki) emblazoned with the words
“Seven Lives!1’

21. Keene, Essays in Idleness, p. 23.

22. Ibid., p. 70.

23. Following a Chinese practice, the medieval Japanese designated five Zen tem-
ples in Kyoto and five in Kamakura as the leading Zen institutions of their respective
cities.

24. Donald Keene, No: The Classical Theatre of Japan, p. 25.

25. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 289.

26. During the shite's absence from the stage, there is a kybgen (discussed below)
in which the priest speaks to a man of the locality and learns more about the history
of the Shrine in the Fields.

27. Matsukaze is the shite and Murasame is a companion (tsure).

28. Donald Keene, ed., Twenty Plays of the No Theatre, pp. 31-32.

29. Arthur Waley, The No Plays of Japan, p. 73.

30. Shinkei, Sasamegoto, in Kido Saizo and Imoto Noichi, eds., Renga Ronshu, Hai-
ronshu, p. 175.

3 1 . Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, pp. 315-16.

32. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 244.

33. Ibid., p. 245.

34. Later, the tea of Uji, south of Kyoto, became esteemed as Japan’s best. Uji tea
remains the best today.

35. Competitions in the arrangement of flowers and the identification of different
kinds of incense were also popular.

36. “Ami” was taken from the first two syllables of Amida.

37. Murai Yasuhiko, “Shuko Kokoro no Fumi,” in Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed.,
Kodai-Chusei Geijutsu Ron , p. 448.

Chapter 6 The Country Unified

1 . European records say that the Portuguese first reached Japan in 1542.

2. Michael Cooper, ed., They Came to Japan, p. 60.

3. Ibid., p. 40.

4. Ibid., p. 42.

5. During the Tokugawa period, the Dutch were known not as namban but as
komo, “redheads.”

6. Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution, p. 140.

356

Notes to Pages 147-208

7. Cooper, They Came to Japan, p. 134.

8. C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650, pp. 195-96.

9. Ibid., pp. 207-8.

10. See the description of Azuchi Castle’s paintings in Carolyn Wheelright, “A
Visualization of Eitoku’s Lost Paintings at Azuchi Castle,” in George Elison and
Bardwell L. Smith, eds., Warlords, Artists, and Commoners, pp. 87-1 1 1.

1 1 . Haga Koshiro, “The Wabi Aesthetic Through the Ages,” in Paul Varley and
Kumakura Isao, eds., Tea in Japan, p. 200.

12. Ibid.

Chapter 7 The Flourishing of a Bourgeois Culture

1 . For example, Ronald Toby in State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan .

2. From 1633 until 1764 the Dutch went annually to Edo. Later they went every
other year, then every fourth year. See Marius Jansen, “Japan in the Early Nineteenth
Century,” in Jansen, ed., Cambridge History of Japan, 5:89.

3. Endo Shusaku, Silence, pp. 96-97.

4. Ibid., p. 236.

5. Nishiyama Matsunosuke, Edo Culture, pp. 35-36.

6. Sansom , Japan, A Short Cultural History, p. 465.

7. Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan, p. 24.

8. Scholars estimate that male literacy in Japan by the end of the Tokugawa period
was more than 40 percent, a figure that compares favorably with, and in many cases
is higher than, European literacy rates for the same period.

9. For example, Herman Ooms in Tokugawa Ideology.

10. Sotatsu, Korin, and the group of painters they influenced are known as the
Rimpa school.

1 1 . Nishi Kazuo and Hozumi Kazuo, What Is Japanese Architecture?, tr. by H. Mack
Horton, p. 133.

12. Ihara Saikaku, Nihon Eitai Gura, pp. 1 12-13.

13. E. S. Crawcour, “Some Observations of Mitsui Takafusa’s Chomin Koken
Roku ,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society) of Japan, 3rd series, vol. 8 (Tokyo, 1961), p. 70.

14. Ibid., p. 88.

15. Uki can be written with two characters, one meaning “wretched” and the
other “floating”; yo means “world.”

16. I have used Ivan Morris’ translations for the titles of all the Saikaku works
mentioned here.

17. Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings, pp. 124-25.

1 8. Ibid., pp. 202-3.

19. The term bunraku is taken from a famous puppet theatre, the Bunrakuza, estab-
lished in Osaka in the nineteenth century. Another term for the puppet theatre is
joruri, adopted from the name of Princess Joruri, a character who appears in some
early puppet plays.

20. Donald Keene, Bunraku : The Art of the Japanese Puppet Theatre, p. 31.

21 . Donald Keene, tr., Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu, pp. 51-52.

22. Keene, Anthology of Japanese Literature, pp. 369 and 371.

23. Quoted in Ivan Morris, The World of the Shining Prince, p. 202.

24. Liza Crihfield, “Geisha,” in Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, 3:15.

Chapter 8 Heterodox Trends

1. For example, Harold Bolitho in Treasures Among Men: The Fudai Daimyo in
Tokugawa Japan.

2. Quoted in Conrad Totman, Early Modern Japan, p. 171.

3. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition , p. 399.

Notes to Pages 208-244

357

4. Soko, in fact, did not use the word bushidd, but, rather, shidd .

5. The scholar was Tsurumi Shunsuke. See Henry D. Smith II, “Rethinking the
Story of the 47 Ronin: Chushingura in the 1980s” (paper prepared for the Modern
Japan Seminar, Columbia University, April 30, 1990).

6. My discussion of this division of opinion is based on Eiko Ikegami, The Taming
of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan , pp. 228-33.

7. Only forty-six ronin committed suicide. The forty-seventh had returned to Ako
after the murder of Kira to inform the domain about what had happened and was not
arrested by the shogunate.

8. Donald Keene, tr., Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers .

9. The shogunate forbade the staging of current events. Hence theatrical pro-
ducers presented the ronin story as an occurrence of the Muromachi period. The
“Kira character” was given the name of one of Ashikaga Takauji’s lieutenants, K6 no
Moronao.

10. Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure , translated by William Scott Wilson, p. 29.

1 1 . Ibid., p. 30.

12. Mishima Yukio, The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern
Life , translated by Kathryn Sparling.

13. The word “mirror” in traditional Chinese and Japanese thought means the
use of history as a “reflector” of proper and moral ways of governance.

14. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition , p. 533.

1 5. Ibid., pp. 534-35.

16. Honda Toshiaki is the principal subject of Donald Keene’s The Japanese Dis-
covery of Europe.

17. Harold G. Henderson, An Introduction to Haiku , p. 86.

18. Ibid., pp. 89 and 101.

19. A translation of The Classic of Tea can be found in Lu Yu, The Classic of Tea,
translated by Frances Ross Carpenter.

20. The term appears to have been coined by a Nagasaki interpreter during the
course of translating Englebert Kaempfer’s History of Japan into Japanese. See Toby,
State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan, pp. 12-14.

21. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition , pp. 595-96.

22. Bob Wakabayashi, Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan,
p. 13.

Chapter 9 Encounter with the West

1 . The imperial seat was at this time moved to Edo and the city’ renamed Tokyo or
Eastern Capital.

2. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition , p. 644.

3. Hirakawa Sukehiro, “Japan’s Turn to the West,” in Jansen, ed., Cambridge His-
tory of Japan, 5:460.

4. Eugene Soviak, “On the Nature of Western Progress: The Journal of the Iwa-
kura Mission,” in Donald H. Shively, ed., Tradition and Modernization in Japanese
Culture, p. 12.

5. Yomiuri Shinbun Sha, ed., Meiji Ishin in Nihon no Rektshi , 10:230.

6. Ibid., p. 234.

7. Donald Keene, ed.. Modern Japanese Literature, p. 31.

8. Hirakawa, “Japan’s Turn to the West,” pp. 470-72.

9. Yomiuri Shinbun Sha, Meiji Ishin , p. 230.

10. Fukuzawa Yukichi, An Encouragement of Learning , p. 1 .

1 1. Quoted in A. M. Craig, “Fukuzawa Yukichi: The Philosophical Foundations
of Meiji Nationalism,” in Robert E. Ward, ed., Political Development in Modern Japan,

pp. 120-21.

358

Notes to Pages 246-283

12. See the discussion of this memorial in Peter Duus, Modern Japan , pp. 108-9.

13. The rescript is translated in full in John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer,
and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: The Modern Transformation, p. 276.

14. Quoted in Kenneth Pyle, “Meiji Conservatism,” in Jansen, Cambridge History
of Japan, 5:691.

1 5. In this discussion of Tokutomi and the “new generation,” I have used Kenneth
B. Pyle, The New Generation of Meiji Japan.

16. The following comments on Christianity in the Meiji period have benefited
from my reading of Irwin Scheiner, Christian Converts and Social Protest in Meiji Japan.

17. Another incident that occurred about this time involved a professor from Tokyo
Imperial University, Kume Kunitake, who was dismissed from his position for writing
an article in which he called Shinto a primitive form of heaven-worship.

18. Tsunoda, deBary, and Keene, Sources of Japanese Tradition, p. 856.

19. Ibid., p. 857.

20. From a passage given in G. B. Sansom, The Western Wbrld and Japan, p. 414.

21. The novelist was Yamada Bimyo. Quoted in Masao Miyoshi, Accomplices of
Silence, pp. 3-5.

22. An excellent monograph dealing with Tsubouchi and Futabatei Shimei and
containing a translation of the latter's novel The Drifting Cloud is Marleigh G. Ryan,
Japan ’s First Modern Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei.

23. Keene, Modern Japanese Literature, p. 57.

24. Robert H. Brower, “Masaoka Shiki and Tanka Reform,” in Shively, Tradition
and Modernization, p. 418.

25. Ibid., p. 396.

26. Sansom, The Western VCbrld and Japan, p. 404.

27. For a discussion of Kawakami, see John M. Rosenfield, “Western-style Painting
in the Early Meiji Period and Its Critics,” in Shively, Tradition and Modernization .

28. For the following remarks on music in the Meiji period, I have relied in partic-
ular on William P. Malm, “The Modern Music of Meiji Japan,” in Shively, Tradition
and Modernization.

29. Ibid., p. 260.

30. The present Kabukiza in Tokyo, however, is still another building, erected by
others in 1889.

Chapter 10 The Fruits of Modernity

1 . Kenneth B. Pyle, “Meiji Conservatism,” in Jansen, Cambridge History of Japan,
5:696.

2. Japan regained this territory after defeating Russia in 1905.

3. The Taisho emperor, Meiji’s son, acceded to the throne in 1912. The reign
period to which he has given his name was 1912-26.

4. Edward Seidensticker, Kafu. the Scribbler, p. 49.

5. Nagai Kafu, The River Surnida, in Keene, Modern Japanese Literature, pp.
196-97.

6. Tanizaki's title for this book was Sasame Yuki ( Thin Snow), but it has been
translated into English by Edward Seidensticker as The Makioka Sisters. It deals with
the decline of an Osaka merchant family in the period before World War II. See the
next chapter for a discussion of this work.

7. Tanizaki Junichiro, Some Prefer Nettles, translated by Edward Seidensticker.

8. Ibid., p. 26.

9. Ibid., pp. 152-53.

10. Natsume Soseki, Kokoro, pp. 240^41.

11. Ibid., p. 245.

12. Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths, p. 221.

Notes to Pages 284-309

359

13. Kano Masanao, Taisho Demokurashii , p. 71.

14. Quoted in Gluck, Japan 's Modern Myths, p. 222.

15. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, p. 422.

16. Shiga Naoya, A Dark Night's Passing, translated by Edwin McClellan.

17. Kobayashi Hideo. Quoted in William F. Sibley, The Shiga Hero , p. 1.

18. Shiga, A Dark Night's Passing, pp. 350-51.

19. Ibid., p. 352.

20. Kodama Kota et al., Nihon Bunka-shi Taikei (Outline of the Cultural History
of Japan), 12:202-3.

21. G. H. Healey, Introduction to Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Kappa, translated by
Geoffrey Bownas, p. 23. The remark is attributed to Kikuchi Kan.

22. Ibid., pp. 29-30.

23. This tale was also made into an extremely popular film, The Gate of Hell (Jigo-
kumon), but the screenplay was based on a version by Kikuchi Kan, not Akutagawa.

24. Keene, Modern Japanese Literature, pp. 302-6.

25. The Showa reign was 1926-89.

26. Keene, Modern Japanese Literature , pp. 336-37.

27. Jeffrey Dym, “Benshi, Poets of the Dark: Japanese Silent Film Narrators and
Their Forgotten Narrative Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawai‘i, 1998).

28. Based on thoughts expressed by Donald Richie in Japanese Cinema , pp. 70-71.

29. Benito Ortolani, “Fukuda Tsuneari: Modernization and Shingeki,” in Shively,
Tradition and Modernization, p. 486.

30. Quoted in A. Horie-Webber, “Modernization of the Japanese Theatre: The
Shingeki Movement,” in W. G. Beasley, ed., Modern Japan, p. 160.

31. Ibid., p. 161.

32. Ibid.

33. This discussion of opera and the Takarazuka Revue is based largely on Roland
Domenig, “Takarazuka and Kobayashi Ichizo’s Idea of Kokumingeki in Sepp Lin-
hart and Sabine Fruhstiick, eds., The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its Leisure, pp.
267-84.

34. J. L. Anderson, “Takarazuka Kagekidan (Takarazuka Opera Company),” in
Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan, 7:318.

35. Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, p. 69.

36. Robert K. Hall, ed., Kokutai no Hongi: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity
of Japan, p. 54.

37. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, p. 98.

38. Ibid., p. 104.

39. Kawabata Yasunari, Snow Country, pp. 6 9.

40. Ibid., p. 24.

41 . Dan van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign, p. 373.

42. Donald Keene, Landscapes and Portraits, pp. 303-5.

43. van der Vat, The Pacific Campaign, p. 373.

Chapter 1 1 Culture in the Present Age

1. Theodore McNelly, ed., Sources in Modern East Asian History and Politics, pp.
169-70.

2. Asahi Shimbun, ed.. Pacific Rivals , pp. 134-35.

3. Hugh Borton, Japan's Modern Century, p. 572.

4. Comments on the postwar “end of the I-novel tradition” can be found in
Yoshida Seiichi and Inagaki Tatsuro, eds., Nihon Bungaku no Rekishi (History of Japa-
nese Literature), 12:410-11.

5. Dazai Osamu, No Longer Human, pp. 124-25.

6. Dazai Osamu, The Setting Sun, p. 166,

360

Notes to Pages 310-338

7. Ibid., pp. 132-33.

8. Yoshida and Inagaki, Nihon Bungaku no Rekishi, 12:410.

9. Masao Miyoshi in Accomplices of Silence.

10. Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters, p. 99.

1 1 . Tanizaki Junichiro, In Praise of Shadows, pp. 20-2 1

12. Quoted in John Nathan, Mishima: A Biography , p. 83.

1 3. Kawabata Yasunari, Japan the Beautiful and Myself, pp. 46-47, 52.

14. Kawabata Yasunari, The Sound of the Mountain, p. 12.

15. Ooka Shohei, Fires on the Plain, p. 216.

16. In a translator's introduction to the Penguin edition of Fires on the Plain, Ivan
Morris points out that the hero did not commit the “ultimate abomination”: he did
not kill another person in order to eat his flesh.

17. Noma Hiroshi, Zone of Emptiness, p. 286.

18. Ibuse Masuji, Black Rain, pp. 296-97.

19. Richie, Japanese Cinema , p. 58.

20. Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film, p. 162.

21. Ibid., p. 176.

22. Richie, Japanese Cinema, p. 64.

23. Based on Ueda Akinari’s (Jgetsu Monogatari, written in the late eighteenth cen-
tury. See Ueda Akinari, Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain.

24. Joan Mellen, Voices from the Japanese Cinema, p. 147.

25. Ted T. Takaya, ed. and tr., Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology , p. xxx.

26. Although it too was banned in the later stages of the war as an unnecessary
extravagance.

27. Kawazoe Noboru, Contemporary Japanese Architecture, p. 19.

28. Quoted in Bruno Taut, Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture, p. 6.

29. Ibid., pp. 15-16.

30. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

31. Clay Lancaster, The Japanese Influence in America, pp. 76-77.

32. Quoted from Wright’s Autobiography, ibid., p. 88.

33. Yamamoto Gakuji, Nihon Kenchiku no Genkyd (The Present State of Japanese
Architecture), pp. 23-24.

34. Kodama Kota et al., Nihon Bunka-shi Taikei, 13:287.

35. Maekawa’s 1955 International House has been torn down and replaced by an-
other, larger structure.

36. For this discussion of mass culture I have learned much from Marilyn Ivy,
“Formations of Mass Culture,” in Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History,
pp. 239-58.

37. Irie Akira, Shin -Nihon no Gaiko (New Japanese Diplomacy), p. 24.

38. William W. Kelly, “Finding a Place in Metropolitan Japan: Ideologies, Institu-
tions, and Everyday Life,” in Gordon, Postwar Japan as History, p. 195.

39. Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Gordon, Postwar Japan as History,
p. 239.

40. H. Neill McFarland, The Rush Hour of the Gods.

41. Harry Thomsen, The New Religions of Japan, p. 16.

42. Carmen Blacker, “Millenarian Aspects of the New Religions in Japan,” in
Shively, Tradition and Modernization, p. 575.

43. This was true, for example, of the spirit of the Meiji Restoration.

44. Blacker, “Millenarian Aspects,” p. 587.

45. Thomsen, The New Religions of Japan, p. 90.

46. Nathan Glazer, citing a poll by the Japanese newspaper Asahi, notes that
Mishima is one of the very few Japanese whom even a small percentage of Americans
can identify by name. See Akira Irie, Mutual Images, p. 142.

Notes to Pages 338-350

361

47. This theme is developed in John Nathan’s biography of Mishima, Mishima: A
Biography.

48. Mishima Yukio, Confessions of a Mask , p. 40.

49. Ibid., pp. 251-52.

50. Miyoshi, Accomplices of Silence, p. 157.

51. Mishima Yukio, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, p. 29.

52. Ibid., pp. 63-64.

53. Nathan, Mishima : A Biography, p. 275.

54. Marleigh Ryan, “The Mishima Tetralogy,” p. 165.

55. Abe Kobo, The Ruined Map, p. 162.

56. Abe Kobo, The Woman in the Dunes, pp. 161-62.

57. Ibid. , p. 239.

58. Oe Kenzaburo, A Personal Matter, pp. 15-16.

59. Oe Kenzaburo, Japan the Ambiguous and Myself p. 117.

60. Frederik L. Schodt, Manga! Manga!, p. 12.

61. Ibid., p. 75.

62. An English translation of Hadashi no Gen can be found in Nakazawa Keiji,
Barefoot Gen, A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima .

63. Schodt, Manga! Manga!, p. 124.

64. Antonia Levi, Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation,
pp. 10-11.

65. John Whittier Treat, “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home,” in Treat, ed., Con-
temporary Japan and Popular Culture, p. 280.

66. Yoshimoto Banana, Kitchen, p. 48.

67. Ibid., p. 82.

68. Ibid., pp. 3-4.

This page intentionally I eft blank

Glossary

apure apres-guerre

aragoto “rough business” style of kabuki acting

benshi silent-film narrator

bizva Japanese lute

bugaku ancient court dance

bummei kaika civilization and enlightenment

bunjin “literati” artists

bunraku the puppet theatre

burai-ha “dissolutes,” a designation bestowed upon a group of writers in the period
following World War II
bushidd “the way of the warrior”
chanoyu the tea ceremony
chashitsu tea room
choka “long poem”

chomn townsman of the Tokugawa period

chit loyalty

daibutsu great buddha

daisu lacquered stand (for chanoyu)

dengaku “field music”

doboshu “companions” or art connoisseurs of the Muromachi shogunate
dogu earthen figurine of the Jomon period
dotaku bronze “bell” of the tomb period
emaki horizontal, narrative picture scroll

fudai daimyo vassal or hereditary daimyo of the Tokugawa period
fukko return to antiquity

fukoku-kyohei “Enrich the country and strengthen its arms”
fusuma sliding door

gagaku “elegant music” of the Japanese court
garan plan of a Buddhist temple compound
geisha “person of accomplishment”

gembun-itchi movement to “unify the spoken and written languages”
genro body of governmental “elders”
gijin man of high moral purpose
girt duty

hachi wide-mouthed pottery
haikai “light verse” of the Tokugawa period
haiku seventeen-syllable poetic form
hakama a divided skirt worn by men
han daimyo domain

haniwa terra cotta figurine of the tomb period

364

Glossary

harai internal purification or exorcism in Shinto

heimei quality of “openness and candor” seen in the haniwa figurines

himorogi area marked off by rocks and ropes

inja a person who has withdrawn from society

iwasaka area marked off by rocks

jidaimono historical play

junshi following lord in death

kabuki plebeian theatre

kagiira Shinto music

kaizuka shell mound

kakekotoba “pivot word” of poetry

kakemono vertical, hanging scroll

kami Shinto deity

kamigakari possession by a deity or spirit
kamikaze wind of the gods
kana Japanese syllabary
kanga Chinese picture
kannen-ieki ideological

kanzen choaku “virtue is rewarded and vice is punished”
karamono Chinese article

kare-sansui type of garden called a “withered landscape”
kaiakiuchi vendetta

kaisureki “living history” play of modern kabuki

kessai external purification in Shinto

ki ether, substance

kd filial piety

koan Zen problem

kofun tomb

kogakit-ha Ancient Studies school of Tokagawa-period Confucianism
kogo vernacular Japanese
kokkeibon “witty book”

kokugaku-ha National Learning (Neo-Shinto) school of the Tokugawa period

kokusui hozon “preservation of the national essence”

kokutai national polity

kdshoku erotic

koto Japanese zither

kugutsu puppeteer of the late Heian and Kamakura periods
kyogen light or comic theatre of the Muromachi period
magatama curved jewel of the Japanese imperial regalia
makoto sincerity
manga comics

mappo latter days of the Buddhist law
matsuri festival
michi way

michiyuki theatrical “lovers’ journey”
minken people’s rights
miyabi courtly refinement
moga “modern girl”
monogatari tale

monomane acting technique — the “imitation of things”
mono no aware a “sensitivity’ to things”
mugen “ghostly dream” ( no play)
mujd Buddhist idea of impermanence

Glossary

365

mukyokai “non-church” movement

namban literally, “southern barbarians” — form of culture

nembutsu invocation in praise of Ami da buddha

nijiriguchi “crawling in” entrance to tea room

nikki diary

mnjd human feelings

nishiki-e “brocade,” multicolored woodblock print
no classical theatre of the Muromachi period
okashi lightness or wit

onnagata female impersonator of the kabuki theatre

raigo pictorial representation of the coming of Amida at the time of death

rangaku Dutch Studies

rekishi monogatari historical tale

renga linked verse

ri reason or principle

ronin masterless samurai

sabi loneliness

sakoku “closed country”

samisen Japanese banjo-like musical instrument

sangiri “cropped hair” play of modern kabuki

sankin kotai alternate attendance

sansui landscape (literally, “mountains and water”)

sarugaku “monkey music”

satori Buddhist enlightenment

sencha infused tea

seppuku disembowelment

sewamono contemporary or domestic play of the puppet and kabuki theatres

sharebon “amorous book”

shasei realistic depiction

shimai climactic dance in a no play

shimpa “new school” of theatre of the Meiji period

shin mind

shinden domestic architectural style of the Heian period
shingeki modern theatre
shingon true words
shinigurui “death frenzy”

shinko shukyd “new religions” of modern Japan
s his hi men of high purpose
shishdsetsu I-novel
shite protagonist of no play

shoin domestic architectural style of the medieval age
shoji sliding door covered with translucent rice paper
shomin-geki popular, or home, drama
sonno-joi “Revere the Emperor! Oust the Barbarians!”
sui chic

sukiya “room or building of taste”
sumi-e monochrome ink painting
taikyoku supreme ultimate
laishu bunka mass (popular) culture
tanka short (thirty-one-syllable) poem
tatatni rush matting
tatarigatni malevolent spirit
tateana pit-dwelling

366

Glossary

tenno emperor
tenshu castle donjon
tocha tea-judging contests
tokonoma alcove

torii entranceway to a Shinto shrine

tozama daimyd “outside” daimyo of the Tokugawa period

tsu savoir faire

tsure “companion” of a no play
tsutoamono warrior
uji clan

ukiyo-e “pictures of the floating world”

uta-monogaiari poem-tale

wabi aesthetic of the tea ceremony

zuabicha tea ceremony based on th aesthetic of wabi

zvagoto “soft business” style of kabuki acting

ivaka thirty-one-syllable poem

waki subordinate actor of a no play

yamazato mountain village

yojo resonances

yomihon historical novel

yugei elegant pastime

yugen mystery and depth

zuihitsu miscellany or “running brush”

Selected Bibliography

Abe Kobo. The Box Man. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf, 1974.

. The Ruined Map. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf, 1969.

. The Woman in the Dunes. Translated by E. Dale Saunders. New York: Knopf,

1964.

Agency for Cultural Affairs, ed. Japanese Religion. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1972.

Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Kappa. Translated by Geoffrey Bownas. London: Peter Owen,
1970.

Anderson, Joseph L., and Donald Richie. The Japanese Film. New York: Grove Press,
1959.

Asahi Shimbun, ed. Pacific Rivals. New York: Weatherhill, 1972.

Aston, W. G., tr. Nihongi. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1896.

Beasley, W. G., ed. Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Bolitho, Harold. Treasures Among Men: The Fudai Daimyo in Tokugawa Japan. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

Borton, Hugh. Japan's Modern Century. New York: Ronald Press, 1970.

Boxer, C. R. The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1951 .

Brower, Robert H., and Earl Miner. Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1961.

Cooper, Michael, ed. They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan ,
1543-1640. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965.

Covell, Jon Carter. Under the Seal of Sesshu. New York: De Pamphilus, 1941 .

Crawcour, E. S. “Some Observations on Mitsui Tadafusa's Chomin Koken Roku.”
Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 3rd series, vol. 8 (Tokyo 1961).

Dazai Osamu. No Longer Human . Translated by Donald Keene. New York: New’
Directions, 1958.

. The Setting Sun . Translated by Donald Keene. New York: New' Directions,

1956.

Domoulin, Heinrich. A History of Zen Buddhism. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963.

Duus, Peter. Modern Japan. Second edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Dym, Jeffrey. “Benshi, Poets of the Dark: Japanese Silent Film Narrators and Their
Forgotten Narrative Art.” Ph. D. dissertation. University of Hawai‘i, 1998.

Edwards, Walter. “Event and Process in the Founding of Japan: The Horserider
Theory in Archeological Perspective.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 9, no. 2
(Winter 1983).

Elison, George, and Bardwell L. Smith, eds. Warlords, Artists , and Commoners . Hono-
lulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1981.

Endo Shusaku. Silence. Translated by William Johnston. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1969.

Fairbank, John K., Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig. East Asia: The Modern
Transformation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.

368

Selected Bibliography

Farris, William Wayne. Heavenly Warriors . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1992.

Fukuzawa Yukichi. An Encouragement of Learning. Translated by David Dilworth and
Umeyo Hirano. Tokyo: Sophia University, 1969.

Gluck, Carol. Japan's Modern Myths. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Gombrich, E. H. The Study of Art. London: Phaedon, 1950.

Gordon, Andrew, ed. Postzuar Japan as History. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993.

Hall, Robert K., ed. Kokutai no Hongt: Cardinal Principles of the National Entity of
Japan. Translated by John O. Gauntlett. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1949.

Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed. Kodai-Chusei Geijutsu Ron. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1973.

Heinrich, Amy, ed. Currents in Japanese Culture: Translations and Transformations. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Henderson, Harold G. An Introduction to Haiku. New York: Doubleday, 1958.

Ibuse Masuji. Black Rain. Translated by John Bestor. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1969.

Ihara Saikaku. The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings. Edited and translated
by Ivan Morris. New York: New Directions, 1963.

— . Nihon Eitai Gura. Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1975.

Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of
Modern Japan. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Imamura, Keiji. Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives on Insular East Asia. Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press, 1996.

Irie, Akira. Mutual Images. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975.

. Shin- Nihon no Gaiko. Tokyo: Chub Kdron Sha, 1991.

Jansen, Marius, ed. The Cambridge History of Japan. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989.

Kano Masanao. Taisho Demokurashii. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 1976.

Kawabata Yasunari. Japan the Beautiful and Myself Translated by Edward G. Seiden-
sticker. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1969.

. Snow Country. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf,

1956.

. The Sound of the S lountain. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New

York: Knopf, 1970.

. Thousand Cranes. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf,

1959.

Kawazoe, Noboru. Contemporary Japanese Architecture. Tokyo: Kokusai Koryu Kikin,
1973.

Keene, Donald. Bunraku: The Art of the Japanese Puppet Theatre. Tokyo: Kodansha,
1965.

. The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830. Revised edition. Stanford, Calif.:

Stanford University Press, 1969.

— . Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers. New York: Grove Press,

1955.

. Landscapes and Portraits: Appreciations of Japanese Culture. Tokyo: Kodansha,

1971.

. N5: The Classical Theatre of Japan. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1966.

, comp, and ed. Anthology of Japanese Literature. New York: Grove Press, 1955.

, ed. Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology. New York: Grove Press, 1956.

— , ed. and tr. Twenty Plays of the No Theatre. New York: Columbia University

Press, 1970.

, tr. Chushingura: The Treasury of Loyal Retainers. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1971.

Selected Bibliography

369

, tr. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1967.

, tr. Four Major Plays of Chikamatsu. New York: Columbia University Press,

1961.

Kido Saizo and Imoto Noichi, eds. Renga Ronshu, Haironshu. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,
1961.

Kondo Ichitaro. Japanese Genre Painting: The Lively Art of Renaissance Japan. Trans-
lated by Roy Andrew Miller. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1961 .

Kuck, Loraine. The World of the Japanese Garden. New York: Walker- Weatherhill,
1968.

La Fleur, William R. The Karma of Words: Buddhism and the Literary Arts in Medieval
Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

Lancaster, Clay. The Japanese Influence in America. New’ York: Walton Rawls, 1963.

Lane, Richard. Masters of the Japanese Print. Newr York: Doubleday, 1962.

Ledyard, Gari. “Galloping Along with the Horseriders: Looking for the Founders of
Japan.” The Journal of Japanese Studies, vol. 1, no. 2 (Spring 1975).

Levi, Antonia. Samurai from Outer Space: Understanding Japanese Animation. Chicago:
Open Court, 1996.

Linhart, Sepp, and Sabine Fruhstuck, eds. The Culture of Japan as Seen Through Its
Leisure. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998.

McCullough, Helen, tr. Okagami, the Great Mirror. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1980.

McCullough, William, and Helen McCullough, trs. A Tale of Flowering Fortunes. Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980.

McFarland, H. Neill. The Rush Hour of the Gods. New York: Harper & Row?, 1967.

McNelly, Theodore, ed. Sources in Modern East Asian History and Politics. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.

Malm, William P. Japanese Music and Musical Instruments. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1959.

Maruyama Masao. Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan. Translated by
Mikiso Hane. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974.

. Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics. Edited by Ivan Morris.

London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

Mellen, Joan. Voices from the Japanese Cinema. New York: Liveright, 1975.

Michener, James A. The Floating World. New York: Random House, 1954.

Miner, Earl. An Introduction to Japanese Court Poetry. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1968.

, ed. Japanese Poetic Diaries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Minichiello, Sharon A., ed. Japan ys Competing Modernities: Issues in Culture and Democ-
racy, 1900-1930. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1998.

Mishima Yukio. After the Banquet. Translated by Donald Keene. New York: Knopf,
1963.

. Confessions of a Mask . Translated by Meredith Weatherby. New York: New

Directions, 1958.

. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea. Translated by John Nathan.

New York: Knopf, 1965.

. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Translated by Ivan Morris. New York:

Knopf, 1958.

. The Way of the Samurai: Yukio Mishima on Hagakure in Modern Life . Trans-
lated by Kathryn Sparling. New York: Basic Books, 1977.

Miyoshi, Masao. Accomplices of Silence: The Modern Japanese Novel. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1974.

Morris, Ivan. The World of the Shining Prince. New York: Knopf, 1964.

, ed. Modern Japanese Stories. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1962.

370

Selected Bibliography

, tr. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon . New York: Columbia University Press,

1967.

Murasaki, Lady. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Arthur Waley. New York: Modern
Library, 1960.

Murasaki Shikibu. The Tale of Genji . Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New
York: Knopf, 1976.

Nagai Kafu. The River Sumida. In Modern Japanese Literature , edited by Donald Keene.
New York: Grove Press, 1956.

Nakazawa Keiji. Barefoot Gen , A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima. Philadelphia: New Society
Publishers, 1987.

Nathan, John. Mis him a: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.

Natsume Soseki. Kokoro. Translated by Edwin McClellan. Chicago: Henry Regnery,
1957.

Nishi Kazuo and Hozumi Kazuo. What Is Japanese Architecture? Translated by
H. Mack Horton. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1983.

Nishiyama Matsunosuke. Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600-
1868. Translated by Gerald Groemer. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1997.

Noma, Hiroshi. Zone of Emptiness. New York: World, 1956.

Oe Kenzaburo. Japan the Ambiguous and Myself. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995.

. A Personal Matter. Translated by John Nathan. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

Ooka Shohei. Fires on the Plain. Translated by Ivan Morris. New York: Knopf, 1957.

Ooms, Herman. Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs , 1570-1680. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1985.

Paine, Robert T., and Alexander Soper. The Art and Architecture of Japan. Baltimore,
Md.: Penguin Books, 1955.

Parker, Geoffrey. The Military Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988.

Pyle, Kenneth B. The New Generation of Meiji Japan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity' Press, 1969.

Richie, Donald. Japanese Cinema. New York: Doubleday, 1971.

Ryan, Marleigh G. The Development of Realism in the Fiction of Tsnbouchi Shoyo. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1975.

. Japan's First Novel: Ukigumo of Futabatei Shimei. New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1967.

. “The Mishima Tetralogy.” The Journal of Japanese Studies , vol. 1, no. 1

(Autumn 1974).

Sansom, G. B. Japan , A Short Cultural History. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1931.

. The Western World and Japan. New York: Knopf, 1958.

Scheiner, Irwin. Christian Converts and Social Protest i?i Meiji Japan. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1970.

Schodt, Frederik L. Manga/ Manga/ New York: Kodansha, 1983.

Seidensticker, Edward. Kafu the Scribbler. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
1965.

, tr. The Gossamer \%ars. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964.

Shiga Naoya. A Dark Night's Passing. Translated by Edwin McClellan. Tokyo: Kodan-
sha, 1976.

Shively, Donald H. Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1971.

Sibley, William F. The Shiga Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Takaya, Ted T., ed. and tr. Modern Japanese Drama: An Anthology. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1979.

Selected Bibliography

371

Tanizaki Junichiro. Diary of a Mad Old Man . Translated by Howard Hibbett. New
York: Knopf, 1965.

. In Praise of Shadows. Translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Sei-

densticker. New Haven: Leete’s Island Books, 1977.

The Makioka Sisters. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York:

Knopf, 1957.

— . Some Prefer Nettles. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf,

1955.

Taut, Bruno. Fundamentals of Japanese Architecture. Tokyo: Society’ for International
Cultural Relations, 1936,

Terry, Charles S., ed. Masterworks of Japanese Art. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1956.

Thomsen, Harry. The New Religions of Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1963.

Toby, Ronald. State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan: Asia in the Development of
the Tokugawa Bakufu. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Totman, Conrad. Early Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Treat, John Whittier, ed. Contemporary Japan and Popular Culture . Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawaii Press, 1996.

Tsunoda, Ryusaku, William T. deBary, and Donald Keene, eds. Sources of Japanese
Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Ueda Akinari. Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain. Translated by Leon
Zolbrod. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1974.
van der Vat, Dan. The Pacific Campaign: The US.-Japanese Naval War , 1941-1945.
New York: Touchstone, 1992.

Varley, Paul. Warriors of Japan, As Portrayed in the War Tales. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1994.

Varley, Paul, and Kumakura Isao, eds. Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu.

Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989.

Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi. Anti- Foreign ism and Western Learning in Early-Modern
Japan: The New Thesis of 1825. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Waley, Arthur. The No Plays of Japan. New York: Grove Press, 1957.

Ward, Robert Edward, ed. Political Development in Modern Japan. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1968.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo. Hagakure. Translated by William Scott Wilson. Tokyo:
Kodansha, 1979.

Yomiuri Shimbun Sha, eds. Meiji Ishin. Vol. 10 of Nihon no Rekishi. Tokyo: Yomiuri,
1964.

Yoshimoto Banana. Kitchen. Translated by Megan Backus. New York: Washington
Square Press, 1993.

This page intentionally I eft blank

Index

Abe Kobo, 325, 337-338, 342-346
Aesop's Fables , 149, 257
aesthetes, 279-282

Aguranabe (Eating Stew Cross-legged), 241
Ainu, 48-49

Aizawa Seishisai, 232-233
Akazome Emon, 68-69
Akihito, Emperor, 14
akusd, 50

Akutagawa Ryunosuke, 288-290, 319
Amaterasu (Sun Goddess), 8, 12-14, 17,
20, 26, 37, 52

Amida Buddha, 21, 52, 70, 71-73, 74, 81,
92, 98-100, 137, 187
Amidism. See Pure Land Buddhism
Analects (of Confucius), 84
Ancient Studies School. See kogaku-ha
Ando Hiroshige, 199, 226-229, 230
Animal Scrolls, 87, 225, 346
apure ( apres guerre) generation, 310
aragoto (rough business), 189
Arai Hakuseki, 215, 220
Ariwara no Narihira, 64, 176
Around the World in Eighty Days , 258
A rt of the Language of Japan , 1 49
Asakusa Operas, 294
Ashikaga period. See Muromachi period
Ashikaga Takauji, 108-110
Ashikaga Yoshimasa, 120-121
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, 111-114, 118, 120
Asuka period, 28, 31
Atsumori, 118-119
aware. See mono no aware
Azuchi, 147-148, 153, 155, 162, 173

Bach, J.S., 269
Ban Dainagon Scroll, 87
Bando Tamasaburo, 325
Barefoot Geny 347

Basho. See Matsuo Basho
Battles of Coxinga, The , 1 9 1
Beardsley, Aubrey, 288
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 269
benshi (narrator), 292
biwa (lute), 80, 267
Blacker, Carmen, 336-337
Black Rain , 3 1 7
Bodhidharma, 102-103
bon festival, 1 87
Boxer, C.R., 149
Broken Commandment , They 278
Brower, Robert, 263

Buddhism, 8, 9, 11, 15, 19, 27,28,48,61,
70, 84, 107, 113, 119, 142, 144, 150,
181, 192, 206, 216, 217; architecture
and art of, 28-33, 38-42, 54; Heian
period sects of, 49-54; introduction
to Japan, 20-22; Kamakura period
sects of, 98-105; and Neo-Confucian-
ism, 171-172; and the new religions,
335-337

bugaku dance, 113, 175
Bulwer-Lytton, 257

bummei-kaika (civilization and enlighten-
ment), 238, 240, 241-242
Bungakukai (The Literary World)y 277 , 278
bunjiti. See literati artists
Bunka-Bunsei epoch, 229-231, 262
bunraku. See puppet theatre
burai-ha (dissolutes), 308-310
bushidd (way of the warrior), 208, 210
Byodoin Temple, 73-74, 79, 137, 329, 337

Camus, Albert, 307, 308
Cannery Boat, The, 291-292
Caruso, Enrico, 288
Cezanne, Paul, 175, 285
chambara swordplay, 292, 323

374

Index

Ch’ang-an, 34, 56

chancy u (tea ceremony), 124-129, 321; in
Kawabata's Nobel speech, 313-314;
and Sen no Rikyu, 160-163; in the
Tokugawa period, 181-182
Character of Present-day Students, The, 260
Charter Oath, 237-238
Chekhov, Anton, 294
Chiang Kai-shek, 290
Chikamatsu Monzaemon, 190-193, 197,
199, 208, 229, 252

China, 2, 4, 5, 11, 12, 14, 21, 22, 33, 34,
35, 48, 49, 51, 55, 68, 82, 83, 84, 94,
102, 104, 105, 106, 143, 162, 164, 165,
170, 212, 223, 233, 351; and bunjin
artists, 223-225; dynastic histories of,
7-8, 16, 67; influence on Japanese
imperial institution, 20; Japanese
aggression in, 296; Japanese copying
of, 56; Japanese relations with, 57-58;
and the Japanese tea ceremony, 1 24-
129; language of, 36; missions to Sui
and T’ang, 24 25; as model for early
Japanese state, 27 28; reunification
under Sui and T’ang, 19; and sencha ,
231; Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895),
271-272; Sino-Japanese War (1937-
1945), 300-301; trade with during the
Muromachi period, 111113; trade
with during the Tokugawa period,
164-165

Ch’in dynasty (of China), 4
Chingghis Khan, 105
choka (long poem), 42
chdnin (townsman), 169 170
Choshu, 236-237, 273; Satsuma-Choshu
oligarchy, 245-247, 255-256
Christianity, 143-144, 149-152,219, 220,
233, 241, 274, 277, 278; church music,
269; in the Meiji period, 252-255;
persecution of, 164-167
Chu Hsi, 171-173, 205, 206
Chiid Kdroti (Central Review) , 275
Chushingura (A Treasury of Loyal Retainers ),
210-211, 325

cinema: after World War II, 318-324;

before World War II, 292-293
“civilization and enlightenment." See
bummei-kaika
Clark, William S., 254
Classic of Tea , The, 231
Collection of Poems in the New Style , 263
Communist Party (Japanese), 290-291

Comprehensive Mirror of Our Country, The ,
215

Conditions in the Western World, 243
Condor, Josiah, 326
Confessions of a Mask , 338-340
Confucianism, 11, 15, 20, 27, 51, 52, 56,
61, 83, 84, 1 13; and the Imperial
Rescript on Education, 248, 256; and
the School of National Learning, 216-
218; in the Seventeen-Article Constitu-
tion, 25-26; and the thought of Yoshino
Sakuzo, 275; during the Tokugawa
period, 170-173, 213-214
Confucius, 25, 84

Constitution of 1947, 305-306, 333
Cubism, 284-285, 331

Dada, 299

daibutsu. See Vairochana

Dainichi Buddha, 51-52

Daisen’in, Daitokuji Temple, 137

Dancing Girl , The, 277-278

Danrin School, 195, 196

Dark Night's Passing, A, 285-286

Dazai Osamu, 290, 308-310

Death of a Salesman, 325

Defoe, Daniel, 186

dengaku theatre, 114, 123

Deshima (or Dejima), 164 165, 219, 220

Diary of a Mad Old Man, The, 28 1

Disraeli, Benjamin, 258

doboshu (companion), 126

Dogen, 205

dogu (earthenware figurine), 3, 5
Dokyo, 48

dotaku (bronze bell), 18
Drifting Cloud, The , 261, 277
Dutch, 144, 152, 164-165, 166, 215, 229,
231; School of Dutch Studies, 219-222

“Eastern Morals and Western Technol-
ogy," 234
Eckert, Fritz, 269
Egami Namio, 16

Eightfold Noble Path (of Buddhism), 20-21
Eisai (also Yosai), 124-125
Eisenhower, Dwight, 333
emaki (picture scroll), 86-89
Emishi, 48-49, 77
Emperor-Organ Theory, 298
Encouragement of Learning , An, 243
Endo Shusaku, 166-167
Engakuji Temple, 105, 142

Index

375

Enryakuji Temple, 49-5 1
equal-field system, 27
Ernest Mahravers, 257
Essays in Idleness, 110-111, 312
Essence of the Novel, The, 260, 262
Essentials of Salvation , 70-71
Eternal Storehouse of Japan, The, 1 86
Existentialism, 308, 319
Expressionism, 284-285

Faulkner, William, 307
Fauvism, 284-285
Fenollosa, Ernest, 89, 265-267
“Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, The,”
229

Fillmore, Millard, 235

Fires on the Plain , 3 1 5-3 1 6

Five Women Who Chose Love, 1 84

Flowing, 322

Fontanesi, Antonio, 265

forty-seven ronin, 208-21 1, 283

Four Noble Truths (of Buddhism), 20

Franciscans, 166

Friend of the People, 250-251

Friends, 325

fudai (hereditary) daimyo, 167-168
Fudo, 56

Fujiwara no Ietaka, 160
Fujiwara no Kaneie, 63
Fujiwara no Michinaga, 69-70, 71, 73
Fujiwara no Yorimichi, 73, 79
Fujiwara Seika, 173
Fujiwara Teika, 96-98
fukko (return to antiquity), 237, 245
fukoku-kyohei (Enrich the country and
strengthen its arms), 237
Fukuzawa Yukichi, 242-244, 248, 250,
252, 257; on the Sino-Japanese War
(1894-1895), 271-272
functionalism, 327

Fundamental Principles of Our National
Polity, The, 297

Futabatei Shimei, 259-261, 262, 277

gagaku music, 1 1 3, 269
Ganjin, 40, 94

garan (temple pattern), 28, 54
Gauguin, Paul, 285

Gautama (Shaka), 20-21, 30-31, 49, 70,
101, 102
Geiami, 126

geisha (person of accomplishment), 202-
204, 300

gembun-iichi (unify the spoken and written
languages), 259
Genji Screen, 175, 176
Genji Scrolls, 86-87, 202
genro (elders), 255

Genroku epoch, 170, 176, 182, 184, 186,
189, 191, 197, 214, 229, 262, 276;
forty-seven ronin, 210-21 1; nature of,
179-181
Genshin, 70-7 1
gigaka dance, 42

giri (duty, obligation), 184, 191, 208, 320
Gluck, Carol, 283
Godaigo, Emperor, 107-110
Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji), 111, 121
Gorki, Maxim, 294
Gossamer Years, The, 63
Gozan (Five Zen Temples) literature, 1 1 3,
130, 141

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,
301

Great Learning, The, 1 7 1
Great Mirror, The, 69-70
Great Reform. See Taika Reform
Gropius, Walter, 326

hachi (pottery form), 6
Haga Koshiro, 160-161
Hagakure, 211-213

h a ikai (light verse), 183, 193-195, 197
haiku poetry, 43, 225, 262, 263, 280, 299,
313; and Basho, 195-197
Hakuho period, 31-33
Hamlet, 324
Hanae Mori, 351
Han dynasty (of China), 19, 223
haniwa figurines, 14-16, 18, 31, 77
harai (internal purification, exorcism), 9
Harakiri, 323, 324

harakiri (also seppuku , disembowelment),
323

Harris, Townsend, 235-236, 238, 243
Harunobu. See Suzuki Harunobu
Hasegawa Tohaku, 156
Hayashi Razan, 172-173, 206, 207, 213
Hearn, Lafcadio, 282
Heian period: Buddhist sects, 49-54, 70-
74; Jogan art, 55-56; monogatari, 67-
70; move to, 48; poetry (Kokinshu),
58-61; prose literature, 61-67; shinden
construction, 74-76; Shinto architec-
ture, 54-55
Heiji Conflict, 89

376

Index

heimei (openness and candor), 15
Hemingway, Ernest, 307
Hersey, John, 307

Higashiyama epoch, 121-123, 128-129,
137, 140, 193

Himiko (Pimiko), Queen, 7-8, 11, 14, 24
himorogi rock formation, 134-137
Hinayana (Buddhism), 21, 49-50, 51, 70
Hinduism, 21
Hirata Atsutane, 218-219
Hiroshige. See Ando Hiroshige
Hiroshima , 307

Hishikawa Moronobu, 197-199
History of Great Japan , The , 215, 232
History of Japan , 220
History of the Kingdom of Wei, 8
Hitler, Adolf, 297

Hizakurige (A Journey by Foot), 230
Hizen, 245
Hojoji Temple, 73

Hojoki (An Account of a Ten-foot-square
Hut), 91-93, 110
Hokusai. See Katsushika Hokusai
Hon’ami Koetsu, 174-175
Honda Toshiaki, 222
Honen, 98-99, 101
horse-rider theory, 1 6
Horyuji Temple, 28-31, 32-33, 38, 87, 346
Human Condition, The , 323

Ibsen, Henrik, 294
Ibuse Masuji, 317
Ichikawa Danjuro, 189
Ihara Saikaku, 181, 183-186, 191, 193,
197, 199, 229, 230, 252, 262, 276
Ikegami, Eiko, 209-210
Ike no Taiga, 223-225
Ikxru (To Live), 318, 319 320
Imperial Hotel, 328

Imperial Rescript on Education, 248, 256

Impressionism, 227 , 267, 284-285

India, 19, 20, 36, 38, 42, 51, 102

Industrial Art School, 265-266

inja (one withdrawn from society), 96

I-novel, 277, 279, 285, 288, 308

In liaise of Shadows, 312-313

Ippen, 99-100, 187

Ippen Scroll, 99-100

Iris Screen, 176

Ise Miyake, 351

Ise Shrine, 13, 17-18, 327

Ise Taira, 79-82, 91

Itagaki Taisuke, 245-246, 252

Ito Hirobumi, 247, 249, 255, 273

Iwakura Mission, 238-239, 240, 248, 252

Iwakura Tomomi, 238

iwasaka rock formation, 134-137

Izanagi and Izanami, 1 2

Izawa Shuji, 269

Janes, Leroy L., 253
Japanese, The , 251, 263
Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, 329
“Japan the Beautiful and Myself,” 313
Jesuits, 143-144, 220, 264; and namban
culture, 147-149; rivalry with Fran-
ciscans, 166

jidaimono (historical play), 190

Jimmu, Emperor, 14

Jingoji Temple, 56

Jippensha Ikku, 230, 257

Jocho, 74

Joei Code, 105

Jogan epoch, 55-56, 71, 94

Jomon (Neolithic) age, 2-4, 5, 6, 7, 48

Journey by Foot Through Western Lands, 257

junshi (following lord in death), 283-284

kabuki theatre, 157, 186-189, 190, 191,
193, 197, 202, 203, 208, 267, 280,

292, 320, 348, 35 1 ; during the Meiji
period, 270; in the post- World War II
period, 324-325; and the Takarazuka
troupe, 295

Kaempfer, Englebert, 219-220
Kafka, Franz, 342

Kagemusha (The Shadow Warrior) , 145
kagura dance, 86
Kaijuso, 47, 56
Kaikei, 94

kakekotoba (pivot word), 44
Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, 45-46
Kamakura period: founding of the
Kamakura shogunate, 91; imperial
succession dispute, 107-108; Mongol
invasions, 105-107; new sects of
Buddhism, 98 105; poetry (Shinkokin-
shu), 95- 98; prose, 91-93; renaissance
in sculpture, 93-94
kame (pottery form), 6-7
kami (deity), 8-13, 19, 22, 26, 53, 56, 134,
218

kamigakari {kami possession), 1 1, 336
kamikaze (divine wind): in Mongol inva-
sions, 107, 110; during World War II,
304

Index

377

Kamo Mabuchi, 216-217, 263
Kamo no Chomei, 91-93
Kanagaki Robun, 241, 257
Kan’ami, 1 14, 121

kana syllabary, 36, 51, 58, 61, 62, 63, 69,
86, 183

kcma-zdshi ( kana books), 1 83
kanga (Chinese painting), 153, 162
Kannon, 31

Kano Eitoku, 153, 155, 157, 173, 175

Kano Masanobu, 152-153

Kano Mitsunobu, 173

Kano Motonobu, 153

Kano school, 152-157, 173, 197, 198, 266

KanoTanyu, 173

kanzen choaku (virtue rewarded, vice pun-
ished), 230

karamono (Chinese articles), 128-129
kare-sansui (withered landscape), 137-138
karma , 20

karyukai (flower and willow world), 203
kaiakiuchi (vendetta), 211
Katsura Detached Palace, 178-179, 327-
328, 330

katsureki (living history), 270
Katsushika Hokusai, 199, 226-227, 230,
346

Kawabata Yasunari, 298-300, 310, 313-
315, 345

Kawakami Otojiro, 270
Kawakami Togai, 265
Kawatake Mokuami, 270
Keene, Donald, 114-115, 190, 302
Kenchoji Temple, 105
Ken’yusha (Society of Friends of the Ink-
stone), 261-262, 276
Kesa and Morito, 289-290
kessai (external purification), 9
Khubilai Khan, 83, 105
ki (ether, substance), 171, 206
Kierkegaard, Soren, 308
Kimi ga Yo (His Majesty’s Reign), 269
Ki no Tsurayuki, 59-60, 61, 62-63
Kishi Nobusuke, 333
Kissa Yojbkiy 125

Kitagawa Utamaro, 199-202, 230
Kitano Shrine, 162
Kitayama epoch, 111, 113-114, 121
Kitchen , 349-350
kitchen middens ( kaizuka ), 2
koan (Zen problem), 103-104
Kobayashi Ichizo, 295
Kobayashi Masaki, 323-324

Kobayashi Takiji, 291
Kofiikuji Temple, 94
kogaku-ha (School of Ancient Studies),
207-208, 213-214, 231
Koguryo, 16, 25

Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), 11-14,
26, 37, 42, 215; Motoori Norinaga’s
translation of, 217-18
Kokinshu, 58-61, 96, 140, 174, 263, 269,
312

kokkeibon (witty books), 257
Kokoro, 282-283

kokugaku-ha (School of National Learn-
ing), 213, 216-219, 225, 231, 232, 263
kokumin-geki (theatre for the people), 295
kokutai (national polity), 233, 256, 275-
276, 297, 305, 317, 337
Komeito, 337

Korea, 2, 4, 8, 16, 19, 28, 106, 142, 150,
164, 165; in crisis of 1873, 245, 249;
influence on early Japan, 24-25; in the
Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), 271
Korean W'ar (1950-1953), 306-307
koshoku (erotic), 184
kosode (small sleeve) kimono, 176
koto (zither), 267
Kreisler, Fritz, 288
Kuang-wu, Emperor (of China), 7
Kudara Kannon, 31
kugutsu puppeteers, 1 89
Kukai (Kobo Daishi), 51-54, 56, 58, 70,
101, 205

Kumamoto band, 253
kura (granary) construction, 18
Kuroda Seiki, 267, 284-285
Kurosawa Akira, 145, 289, 318-320, 322,
323

Kusunoki Masashige, 109-1 10, 283
Kuya, 98, 187

kyogen (mad words), 119-120, 186
Kyiiri Zukai (On the Use of Cucumbers) , 257

La Fleur, William, 92
landscape gardening, 134-138
Later Han dynasty (of China), 7
League of Nations, 296
Le Corbusier, 55, 326, 331
Lenin, Nikolai, 290, 306
Levi, Antonia, 348

Liberal-Democratic Party (LDP), 331 —

332, 351

Liberal Party (Jiyuto), 247, 351
Liberal Theatre, 293

378

Index

Life of a Man Who Lived for Love, The , 1 84

Life of an Amorous Woman, 1 84- 1 86

linked verse. See renga

Literary Association, 293

Literary Rubbish Bin, The, 262

Literary Theatre, 324

literati (bunjin) artists, 223-225, 231

Lotus Sutra, 49-50, 101-102

Love Suicides at Sonezaki, 191-193

Lu Yu, 231

MacArthur, Douglas, 304, 305
Madame Butterfly, 295
Madame de Sade, 325
Maekawa, Kunio, 331
magatama (curved jewel), 13
Mahayana (Buddhism), 20-21, 31, 49-50,
51, 53, 70, 101
Mailer, Norman, 307
Makioka Sisters , The, 280, 310-312, 314
makoto (sincerity), 11, 61, 263
mandala diagram, 52
manga (comics), 346-349
Man Who Turned into a Stick, The, 325
Manyoshu, 42^17, 58-60, 62, 96, 263;

Kamo Mabuchi’s study of, 216-217
mappo, 70, 74, 81, 93, 124; and the Kama-
kura period sects of Buddhism, 98-102
Marco Polo, 24
Maruyama Masao, 296
Maruyama Okyo, 225-226
Marxism, 284, 290-291, 306
Marx, Karl, 306

Masaoka Shiki, 263-264, 266, 306
Mason, Luther, 269

mass (popular) culture: after World War II,
334-335; before World War II, 286-
288

Matsukaze, 117-118

Matsunaga Hisahide, 162

Matsunaga Teitoku, 193

Matsuo Basho, 193-197, 225, 229, 252

matsuri (festival), 9

Matsuura Screen, 159-160

Maupassant, Guy de, 278

Meiji Constitution, 247, 255-256, 277 ,

298

Meiji, Emperor, 237, 283, 290
Meiji period, 222-223; art, 264-267;
building, 241-242; fashions, 239, 241;
literature, 256-264; music, 267-269
Meiji Restoration, 148, 215, 216, 226,

237, 244, 272, 275, 326

Meiji Six Magazine, 242, 244
Meirokusha (Meiji Six Society), 242, 244,
265

Mellen, Joan, 324
nuchi (way). 181
michivuki journey, 191-193
Midsummer Night *s Dream, A, 324
Mifune Toshiro, 3 1 9
Miller, Arthur, 324-325
Mill, John Stuart, 247
Mimana, 16, 25

Minamoto Yoritomo, 91, 93, 100, 105
Ming dynasty’ (of China), 112-113, 132,
141, 207

Minobe Tatsukichi, 298
mtnken (people’s rights) movement, 246-
247

minpoti (people are the foundation), 275
tninshu (people are sovereign), 275
Min’yusha (Society of the People’s
Friends), 250-251
Miroku Buddha, 21,31
Mishima Yukio, 212, 290, 325, 337-342
Mito school, 215, 232-233
miyabi (courtliness), 60, 1 16
Miyake Setsurei, 251, 263
Miyoshi, Masao, 299, 339
Mizoguchi Kenji, 318, 322-323
Momoyama epoch, 148, 152, 175, 177;
castles, 147- 148; genre painting, 156
160; screen painting, 154-156
Mongol invasions, 101, 105-107, 109,
111, 113, 304
Mongols, 83, 104
Mongol Scroll, 107
monogatari (tale), 61, 67-70
monomane (imitation of things), 1 15
mono no aware (sensitivity to things), 60-
61, 66, 96, 217, 312; in Kawabata’s
writing, 314-315, 321
Montesquieu, 220
Mori Ogai, 277, 283
Morita Kanya, 270
Moronobu. See Hishikawa Moronobu
Morse, Edward, 2, 329
Motori Norinaga, 9, 37, 21 6-2 1 8
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 269
mugen (ghostly dream), 1 18
mujo (impermanence), 96
mukydkai (non-church) movement, 254
Murasaki Shikibu, 64, 66
Murata Shuko (alsojuko), 129, 160, 161,
174

Index

379

Muroji Temple, 54, 56
Muromachi period: chanoyu , 124-129;
founding of Muromachi shogunate,
108; landscape gardens, 134-138;
linked verse, 121-124; monochrome
ink painting, 129-134; no and kyogen
theatres, 113-120; prose, 108-111
Mushanokoji Saneatsu, 284
Muso Soseki, 137
Mussolini, Benito, 297
musumeyaku (female roles), 295
Mutual Security Pact, 333

Nagai Kafu, 279-281, 307, 310
Nagashino, battle of, 145
Nakae Toju, 206-207
Nakayama Miki, 336
Nakazawa, Keiji, 347
Naked and the Dead , The , 307
namban (southern barbarian) culture, 144,
148 152, 223

Nara period: move from Nara, 48; move to
Nara, 34-35; poetry (Man’ydshu), 42-
47; Tempyo art and architecture, 38-
42; writing of Kojiki and Nihon Shoki,
37-38

Narrow Road of Oku , The , 196, 225
Naruse Mikio, 321-322
national histories, 38

National Learning School. See kokugaku-ha
Natsume Soseki, 282-283
naturalism, 278-279, 294, 295
nembutsu, 70, 98-100, 101, 102
nembutsu-odori {nembutsu dancing), 187
Neo-Confucianism, 104, 171-173, 186,
205-207, 215, 220, 222
Neolithic (New Stone) age, 1-2
Neoperceptionists (or Neosensualists),
298-299, 308, 313
Neo-Shinto, 1 1
New Order in East Asia, 301
New Proposals , 232-233
new religions, 335-337
Nichiren, 100-102, 337
Nihon (or Nippon), 24
Nihon Shoki (or Nihongi; Chronicles of
Japan), 11-14, 26, 37-38, 42, 49, 67,
68, 217, 218
Nijo Castle, 1 78
Nijo Yoshimoto, 123
nikki (diary), 61-63
Nikko (Toshogu Shrine), 327-328
Ninigi, 13-14

mnjo (human feelings), 184, 191, 260, 320
Nintoku, Emperor, 16
nishiki-e (brocade pictures), 199
Noami, 126

Nobel Prize (for literature): to Kawabata
Yasunari, 298, 313; to Oe Kenzaburo,
345-346

Nogi Maresuke, 283-284

No Longer Human , 309

Noma Hiroshi, 316-317

Nonomiya (The Shrine in the Fields), 116-

117

Northern and Southern Courts, 108-1 10,
111, 146, 215

no theatre, 62, 80, 1 1 3- 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 2 1 ,

186, 267, 270, 32 1 ; of Mishima, 325

Observations on History, 2 1 5
Occupation of Japan, 304-307, 308, 334
OdaNobunaga, 143, 145, 147, 148, 153,
155, 162, 173; and unification of Japan,
141-142

Oe Kenzaburo, 338, 344-346
Ogata Kenzan, 176
Ogata Korin, 175-176, 229
Ogata Soken, 1 76
Ogyu Sorai, 213-214, 216, 220
Oishi Kuranosuke, 208-21 1
Okakura Tenshin, 265-267
okashi (lightness, wit), 66
Okuma Shigenobu, 246-247, 249-250,
252

Okuni, 1 86 1 87
Omura Sumitada, 144
OninWar, 120-121, 140, 141, 146-147,
157

onnagata (female role), 188, 348
“On the Meaning of Constitutional
Government,” 275
Ooka Shohei, 315- 316
Opium War, 233, 235
Orfeo et Euridice , 294
Orpheus and Eurydice, 1 2
Osanai Kaoru, 293-294
otokoyaku (male roles), 295
Ozaki Koyo, 261-262, 263, 276
Ozu Yasujiro, 293, 320-321, 322, 323

Pacific War, 297
Paekche, 16, 20, 25
Paleolithic (Old Stone) age, 1-2
Parker, Geoffrey, 145
Patriotic Party (Aikokusha), 246

380

Index

Pearl Harbor, 301, 302

people’s rights movement. See rninken

Perry, Matthew, 235-236, 242, 264, 267

Personal Aiatter, A, 344-345

Phaeton incident, 231-232

Physics Illustrated , 257

Pill oic Book , The , 66-67, 1 10

Pope Gregory XIII, 1 50

Portuguese, 143-145, 148, 159, 219, 223

Post-Impressionists, 175,285

Primitivism, 285

Progressive Party (Shimpoto), 247
proletarian writers, 290-292
puppet theatre (bunraku), 188, 189-193,
267, 270

Pure Land Buddhism (Amidism), 70, 92,
98 100, 101, 102, 137, 187, 337

Quilt, The , 279

Rabbit , Run , 344
raigo painting, 71-73, 74
rangaku (School of Dutch Studies), 219-
222, 226, 233, 242, 243, 264
Rashomon , 289, 318, 319
rekishi monogatari (historical tales), 68 70
renga (linked verse), 121-124, 125, 314
Reni, Guido, 338
ri (principle), 171 172, 206
Richie, Donald, 321
Rinzai Zen, 104, 124 125
Ritsu sect (of Buddhism), 101
River Sutmda, The , 279-280
Robinson Crusoe , 257
Rodrigues, Joao, 149
Rokumeikan (Deer Cry Mansion), 249,
269, 326

romanticism, 277-278

Romeo and Juliet, 324

Roosevelt, Franklin, 301, 302

Rosi, Giovanni Vittorio, 294

ronin (masterless samurai), 193, 236, 323

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 247

Ruined Map , The, 342-343

Russo-Japanese War, 271, 273, 278, 283

Ryan, Marleigh, 342

Ryoanji Temple, 1 38

Ryukyus, 160, 164

sabi (loneliness), 96-97, 139
Saga, Emperor, 56, 58
Saicho, 49 51, 56, 101
Saigo Takamori, 245

Saigyo, 95-96, 123, 193
Saihoji Temple, 1 37
Saikaku. See Ihara Saikaku
Saito Dosan, 169
Sakata Tojuro, 189, 190
sakoku (closed or chained country), 164,
232-233

samisen, 160, 190, 204, 267
sangiri (cropped hair) plays, 270
sankin kotai (alternate attendance), 168,
205

Sansho the Bailiff, 322-323
Sansom, Sir George, 51, 230, 264
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 307, 308
sarugaku , 114, 123
Sasaki Doyo, 125-126
Sasamegoto (Whisperings), 123
Satomi ami the Bight Dogs , 230
satori (enlightenment), 102-104, 139, 172
Satsuma, 236-237; Satsuma-Choshu
oligarchy, 245-247, 255-256
Satsuma Rebellion, 245
Schodt, Frederik, 347
Scott, Sir Walter, 258

School of Ancient Learning. See kogaku-ha
School of Dutch Studies. See rangaku
School of National Learning. See
kokugaku-ha
Sea of Fertility , The, 342
Seidensticker, Edward, 279
Seikyosha (Society for Political Education),
251-252

Sei Shonagon, 66

Sekigahara, battle of, 142, 165, 167
Self-Help, 257
sencha (steeped tea), 231
Senkaku, 96

Sen no Rikyu, 160-163, 174
seppuku (disembowelment), 209, 210
Sesshu, 96, 132 134, 141, 152, 154, 156
Setting Sun, The , 309-310
Seven Samurai , 318, 319
Seventeen-Article Constitution, 25-26
sewamono (domestic or contemporary
play), 190, 270, 320

Shakespeare, William, 260, 293, 294, 324
shakubuku (breaking and subduing), 337
shamanism, 8, 11, 335-336
Sharaku. S^Toshusai Sharaku
shasei (realistic depiction), 263
shell mound (kaizuka), 2
Shiba Kokan, 226, 229, 264
Shiba Shiro, 258

Index

381

Shield Society (Tate no Kai), 341

Shiga Hero , The , 286

Shiga Naoya, 283-284, 285-286, 310

shimai dance, 116-117

Shimazaki Toson, 278, 279

shimpa (new school) theatre, 270, 292

shin (action), 206

shinden construction, 74-76, 84, 126, 137,
138, 153

shingcki (modern theatre): in the post-
World War II period, 324-32 5 ; in the
pre- World War II period, 293-294, 295
Shingon Buddhism, 51-54, 70, 101, 105
shinignrui (death frenzy), 212
shinju (double suicide), 191-193, 320
Shinkei, 123

Shinkokinshu, 95-97, 174, 216
Shinran, 99, 101, 205
Shinto, 8-14, 19, 22, 26, 27, 28, 40, 50,
56, 60, 1 07, 1 34, 206, 207, 2 1 9; archi-
tecture of, 17-18, 54 55; and the
Imperial Rescript on Education, 248,
256; and the new religions, 335-337;
School of National Learning, 216-218
shishi (men of high purpose), 236
shite (protagonist), 115-116
shoin construction, 126-128, 153-154
Shokokuji Temple, 130, 132, 141, 176-
179

shomin-geki (popular drama), 293, 320
Shomu, Emperor, 38, 40, 42, 48
Shosoin, 41-42, 87, 154, 346
Shotoku, Prince, 22-24, 27, 28, 30, 31,
40-41, 57, 69-70, 105; Seventeen-
Article Constitution of, 25-26
Showa Restoration, 296
Shrine in i he Fieldsy The , 116-117, 118
Shubun, 130-132, 152, 154
Shun’e, 97-98
shunga (spring pictures), 347
Sibley, William, 286
Sidotti, 220
Silence, 166-167
Silk Road, 36
Silta, 16, 25

Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji), 121
Sino-Japanese War (1894-1 895), 259, 263,
270, 271-272, 277

Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), 300-301,
311

Six Dynasties period (of China): art and
architecture of, 28-31
Smiles, Samuel, 257

Snow Country , 299-300
Soami, 126

Social Darwinism, 248
Society for a New Japanese Literature, 308
Society for the Appreciation of Painting
(Kangakai), 266
Socialist Party, 333
Sogi, 96, 123-124, 193
Soka Gakkai, 337
Some Prefer Settles, 281-282
sonno-joi (Revere the Emperor! Oust the
Barbarians!), 233; and the Meiji Resto-
ration, 236-237
Soto Zen, 104

Sound of the Mountain , The, 314-315
Spencer, Herbert, 248, 251
Spring Tale of Flowers and Willows, The , 257
Strange Encounters of Elegant Females , 257-
258, 270

Streetcar Named Desire , A, 324
sui (chic), 230

Sui dynasty (of China), 19, 24
sumi-e (monochrome painting), 104, 1 29—
134, 138

Sung dynasty (of China), 83- 84, 99,

104, 105, 126; and monochrome ink
painting, 129-134, 153, 154, 223; and
sencha, 231

Sun Goddess. See Amaterasu
Surrealism, 299
Susanoo, 12
Suzuki Harunobu, 198

Tachibana no Hayanari, 56
Taiheiki, 108 110, 190
Taiho Code, 27-28, 34, 237
Taika Reform (Great Reform), 27, 28, 31,
52, 57, 77, 83

Taira no Kiyomori, 79, 82, 84, 91
Taira no Masakado, 80
Taisho Democracy, 273, 274-275
Takagamine, 176

Takarazuka (Girls Opera) Revue, 294-295,
348

takatsuki (pottery form), 7
Takemoto Gidayu, 1 90
Takizawa Bakin, 230-231
Tale of Flowering Fortunes , A, 68-69
Tale of Genji, The , 64-67, 68, 76, 80, 84,
86, 98, 116, 140, 175, 200,295,312,
336; in Kawabata’s Nobel speech, 313;
Motoori Norinaga’s study of, 2 1 6-2 1 7
Tale of Heiji Scroll, 89

382

Index

Tale of the Bamboo Cutter , The, 6 1
Tale of the Heike, The, 80-82, 91-92, 108,
118, 149, 190, 267
Tales of lse. The, 63, 140, 176, 312
T’ang dynasty (of China), 19, 27, 34,

36, 56, 57, 82, 231; art and architec-
ture of, 31-33; Japanese missions to,
24-25

Tange Kenzo, 331

Tanizaki Junichiro, 279-282, 294, 310-
313, 314

tanka (short poem), 262-264

Tantrism, 5 1

Taoism, 51, 92

tatarigami (spirit), 1 1

tateajia (pit-dwelling), 2

Taut, Bruno, 327-328, 330

Tawaraya Sotatsu, 174-175, 229

Tayama Katai, 279

tea ceremony. See chancyu

Teimon School, 193

Temmu, Emperor, 31

Temple of the Golden Pavilion, 340-341

Tempyo epoch, 38-42, 55, 56, 94

Tendai Buddhism, 49-51, 70, 96, 98, 101

tentto (emperor), 20

Tenrikyo, 336

Ten Stages of Religious Consciousness, 5 1
“Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” 226
“three forms” of the Buddha, 2 1
“Three Poets of Minase, The,” 124
Toba, 87, 225, 346
tbcha (tea-judging contests), 125
Todaiji Temple, 38-40, 41, 93-94
Toda Josei, 337
Toganoo, 125
Tojo Hideki, 305
Tokaido, 229, 230
Tokugawa Iemitsu, 178, 188
Tokugawa leyasu, 166, 173, 179; and
unification of Japan, 141-142
Tokugawa period: architecture, 176-179;
chanoyu, 211; Dutch Studies, 219-222;
final years, 236-237; forty-seven rdtnn,
208-213 \ geisha, 203-204; Genroku
epoch, 1 79- 1 8 1 ; literature, 181 186,
230-231; Mito school, 231-234; paint-
ing, 173-176, 197-203,222-229; phi-
losophy, 170-173, 205-208, 213-219;
poetry, 193-197; seclusion policy, 164-
167; society, 168-170, 1 82; theatre,
186-193

Tokugawa Yoshimune, 220

Tokutomi Soho, 250-251, 252, 253; on the
Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895), 272
Tokyo Art School, 266
Tokyo Music Academy, 295
Tokyo Story, 320-321
tomb (kofun) period, 14-16
torii gateway, 12
Tosa, 245
Tosa Dairy, 62-63
Tosa Mitsunobu, 153
Tosa school, 153, 198
Toshodaiji Temple, 40-41
Toshogu Shrine, 179
Toshusai Sharaku, 202, 229
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, 144, 153, 162-163,
168, 169, 173, 174; and Momoyama
culture, 147-152; persecution of Chris-
tians, 1 65-1 66; unification of Japan and
invasions of Korea, 141-1 42, 2 1 5
tozama (outside) daimyo, 167- 168, 236
Trip to the Moon, A, 258
Truth, Goodness , and Beauty of the Japanese
( Sh in-zen-bi Nihon jm) ,251
tsubo (pottery form), 6
Tsubouchi Shoyo, 260-261, 262, 276, 293
tsure (companion), 1 1 5
tsu (s avoir faire), 230
Turgenev, Ivan, 261

Uchimura Kanzo, 254-255, 272
Ugetsu, 322
uji (clan), 19, 27-28
ukiyo (floating world), 182
ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world),
197-202, 229; Hokusai and Hiroshige,
226 229

ukiyo-zdsht (books of the floating world),
183

Unkei, 94

Updike, John, 344

Utamaro and His Five Women, 3 1 8

Utamaro. See Kitagawa Utamaro

uta-monogatari (poem-tale), 63-64

Vairochana (cosmic buddha; dainichi) , 38-
40, 42, 51, 55, 56
Van Gogh, Vincent, 285
Verne, Jules, 258
Versailles Treaty, 274
“Views Inside and Outside Kyoto,” 157

zoabi, 129, 1 39; definition of, 160-161
wabicha ( wabi tea), 1 29, 1 60- 161, 163

Index

383

wagoto (soft business), 189
zvaka poetry, 86, 118, 121, 174, 176, 195,
252, 262, 299; in Kokinshu, 58-61; in
Man [yds hit, 43-47; in Shinkokinshu ,
95-98; during World War II, 302
waki (side person), 115-1 16
wako Qapanese pirates), 112-113
Wa, land of, 7-8, 9, 16, 24
Wang Yang-ming, 207
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 321-322
White Birch (Shirakaba) writers, 284, 285,
310

William II, King, 235
Williams, Tennessee, 324
Wilson, Woodrow, 274
Woman in the Dunes , 343-344
Wright, Frank Lloyd, 328, 330
Wu, Emperor, 102-103

Xavier, Saint Francis, 143

Yakushi (the healing buddha), 21, 32-33,
38, 52, 56

Yamaga Soko, 207-208, 210, 213, 232
Yamagata Aritomo, 273
Yamamoto Tsunetomo, 211-213
Yamatai, 8, 14, 24

Yamato pictures, 84-89, 154, 156
Yamato state, 19, 24, 25, 28, 49
yamazato (mountain village), 93
Yayoi period, 4-7, 15, 18, 48
yin-yang, 12
yojo (resonances), 97
Yosa Buson, 223-225
Yoshida Kenko, 110-111,312
Yoshimoto Banana, 349-351
Yoshino Sakuzo, 274-275
Yuan dynasty (of China), 105, 1 12, 126,
153

yitgei (elegant pastime), 181,231
yugen (mystery and depth), 97-98, 115-
118

zaibatsu (financial combine), 275, 305, 306
Zeami, 1 14-118, 121
Zen Buddhism, 101, 102-105, 124-125,
127, 130, 154, 345; and chanoytt, 231;
culture of, 138-139; influence on
Basho, 195, 197; and Neo-Confucian-
ism, 170-172, 207
Zola, Emile, 278
Zone of Emptiness , 316-317
zuihitsu (miscellany), 67, 110-111

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Texts

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Japanese Culture"

See other formats